It would be naive of me to yet again bring up Lana Del Rey's authenticity, but it's the proverbial elephant in the room when it's time to analyze her music and develop an opinion on it. Despite her fans' insistence on the depth and intricacies behind it, the issue will eternally reside in the backseat compared to her image. Who "Lana Del Rey" is, unfortunately, is intrinsic to her career as a whole, and besides the talk of lips and nosejobs, there is the small matter of Lizzy Grant's questionable sincerity. This battle of authenticity and image made the music she made incidental, and ultimately, a casualty in her debut album Born to Die; a few years later, with Ultraviolence, Lana is making an attempt to put the album at the forefront of the discussion, but this has gone to bite her in her possibly augmented ass, as the focus on her music reveals its total lack of substance.

Stripping away the Tropicos and the music videos and the real names and the plastic surgeries leaves us with the bloated, inert pop under the Lana Del Rey name; Born to Die's theme of the day was strings abuse, whereas Ultraviolence decides to dive headfirst into atmosphere abuse. With producer and Black Key Dan Auerbach in charge, Lana's flimsy singing and misogynistic, nostalgia-obsessed lyrics muddily fuse with more ethereal, airy instrumentals. It's an almost admirable shift in tone, but one that does not pay off.

Thinking about it, "Video Games" was the perfect indie trojan horse, as its demographic crossover appeal was the jumping off point for Lana to infiltrate the zeitgeist and gain the fiercely devoted fanbase she now has. It had her trademark nostalgia-bating, but was far more elegant in its execution. The strings were supplementary rather than a crutch, and her lyrics were poignant, romantic, yet aloof. It was the perfect distillation of what she stood for, but all those elements were turned up to 11 on the full-length album it was on, almost making Born to Die feel like a parody of Americana through the lens of a laughably ignorant, ditzy, codependant, spoiled rich bitch instead of a loving homage to the style. And of course, the memetic qualities of her image spawned fans as likely to love it as they are to idolize Marilyn Monroe and Betty Boop, without even the vaguest understanding of why they should.

It's this holdover tendency from her previous album to be unbelievably vapid and cliche with her lyrics that really stinks up Ultraviolence to the point of no return. The aforementioned intention on making this record more atmospheric comes across as being somewhat futile when compounded with the lyrical problems - the floundering pop of "West Coast", for instance, just drowns in its fuzzy production, and instead of giving it any dreamlike qualities, it becomes more of a hazy nightmare, and Lana's shitty lyrics completely clash with what the actual music is trying to do. Her insistence on writing about wholy unlikable people, packed between asinine lines like "You say you miss me, and I say I miss you so much" sung with the passion of a rotting wildebeest carcass, has a similar amount of sexiness to it.

Taking all this in, it's all the more shocking when I say this is a step in the right direction. Sure, whatever Lana does will be hailed as genius no matter what, and considering her full-fledged status as an everyday pop star (in spite of what her fans would want you to believe), having the gumption to mix up the formula can't be all bad. Well, I mean, it is bad, but at least it's not as bad as Born to Die. And no, I don't mean the cool kind of "bad". The sooner she rids herself of her thematic and image-related crutches like that, the sooner she'll be making "good" music, even if she wants to keep playing the role of "Lana Del Rey".