…because she’s just way too cool for Pat Monahan…
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[6.22]
Patrick St. Michel: Is there anything left to say about Lana Del Rey at this point? “Shades Of Cool” is another cinematic swoon session about what sounds like a horrible man, complete with cliché California tropes (has Lana Del Rey ever gone outside of Los Angeles?) and the awkward “he drives a Chevy Malibu” line. It plays out a lot better than “West Coast,” but just because it figured out how to do timing well doesn’t suddenly make this compelling.
[4]
Megan Harrington: Earlier this week, The New York Times wrote that Nick Cave “has managed to invent a self-contained, coherent fictional world that both he and his followers can enter at will; a kind of exercise in collaborative mythmaking that seems to deepen with each variation on the theme.” Who is Cave’s equal if not Lana Del Rey? “Shades of Cool” immediately deposits us in a coastal local unstuck from time. Menace sears the edges of Del Rey’s story, a slow flame that finally overtakes her in the form of an icy guitar solo. Practically, both Cave and Del Rey prefer long, waltzing narrative arcs and a highly stylized vocal delivery. They’ve invented instantly recognizable stock characters and they inhabit them with indisputable authority. The only difference between the two is that Del Rey isn’t written about with such flattering deference.
[10]
Katherine St Asaph: By george, she’s done it: she’s sung, written and released a genuinely good track. “Shades of Cool” isn’t perfect, mostly because Del Rey still clings to signifiers that bear no resemblance to the real world. When she talks about jazz, it’s like the nu-Voice advising listeners to “pretend you’re staring out at New York City“; she talks about SoCal incessantly, like a person who has never been to the wasteland that is SoCal. But noir-country is a far better backing for her than noir rap producers’ offcuts, and her voice doesn’t sound affected anymore, but flutes and shades like Cortney Tidwell and Cathy Davey and Seventh Tree. The sobering truth here, at least if you like that music, is that Lana Del Rey is Lana Del Rey because labels, or audiences, or most likely some perverted feedback loop of both, don’t have much time for this sound without some distracting gimmick. But for the first time, I feel like this whole project might be going somewhere.
[7]
Jer Fairall: I simply cannot account for the massive success of Lana Del Rey. Were she merely a cult figure, I would at least understand even if I didn’t really get it, but as a platinum-seller, she is surely the most inexplicable one since Dave Matthews. Fittingly, her latest lobotomized ode to an untouchable bad boy feels as endless as one of Matthews’ “Mary Had a Little Lamb” live violin solos.
[2]
Sabina Tang: Lana Del Rey takes a cue from Dum Dum Girls, declaring a boy “unfixable” over swooning West Coast indie guitar theatrics. Though I enjoy her personae and hothouse artificiality, this inspires an odd sense of fiero — like finding out your friend had a breakthrough in talk therapy. She never wanted to hear it from you, but that’s why shrinks have degrees, right?
[8]
Alfred Soto: As languorous as an afternoon spent watching a summer drizzle, “Shades of Cool” lets Del Rey expend considerable emotional resources on a torch song whose flame died after the first bar. The expenditure of said resources reveals her limited physical ones.
[3]
Anthony Easton: This song works overtime to prove that it doesn’t work at all, then gives up trying and descends into bombast, overwhelming the breathy ethereal schtick. It would have been a braver move if it didn’t return back to the original concept.
[4]
Brad Shoup: At its heart, “Shades of Cool” is a compact mid-’60s melodrama blown up to setpiece status. She traipses through the emotional carnage like Roy Orbison, but she catalogs her lover just like Mary Weiss. The signifiers are still here, and her persistence lends weight to all her previous examples, but everything revolves around the line “when he calls, he calls for me and not for you”. That’s killer. So is the chorus, where she swaddles her bald declaratives in reverb and strings and one particularly heart-catching bass note. It’s like a Bond theme threaded through OK Computer.
[9]
Will Adams: “You’re no good for me, but baby I want you” sang Lana Del Rey on “Diet Mountain Dew,” even then demonstrating the inner turmoil within her character (which would cause some critics to deem Born to Die inconsistent). That tumult is only amplified on Ultraviolence, a record that wastes no time dragging you into its molasses-thick aesthetic. “Shades of Cool” is a prime example of Del Rey’s agony over a man who simultaneously incites envy, passion, and hatred. Brooding chromatic arpeggios set the stage for Del Rey’s taunts — “he calls for me and not for you” — until the radiant chorus blazes through, Del Rey praising the man’s staunchness, only to fall away to anxiety that she isn’t his true one — “he prays for love, he prays for peace, and maybe someone new.” For an artist often derided for artificiality, there is something starkly human about Del Rey’s emotional storm; it’s the sadness that stems from being unable to access someone, to know if they truly love you, to know what they think of you, if at all.
[9]