Over five albums, Del Rey’s sound has swung between glacial, expansive rock and cabaret and glossy trip-hop. Rockwell plunges deeper into the first mode, with the producer Jack Antonoff forgoing the ’80s synth shimmer he’s known for. Del Rey’s lyrics—always a serial-killer-note collage of quotations—reference Baby Boomer rock and So Cal hip-hop. But musically, Rockwell more so channels patient, spaced-out troubadours across generations—Simon and Garfunkel, Mazzy Star, Built to Spill—with a hint of anthemic pop. Against smearing guitar, piano, and horns, Del Rey sings with recital-ready stateliness, even though her melodies are quavering and fragile. She’s confronting something, and it’s scaring her.
That something can include bad boyfriends. Rockwell’s opening title track fires off against a “man-child,” “know-it-all” poet—“You talk to the walls when the party gets bored of you”—and it’s very funny: Steal the lines for your next fight. But for Del Rey, comedy and irony rarely have their usual effects of keeping emotion at a distance. At one point, it sounds like someone has fainted on the piano, which creates a clamor not unlike an ohm. Her voice turns the word blue into swirling birdsong, calling back to Joni Mitchell both lyrically and sonically. She can’t quit the man-child. What does that make her?
Del Rey’s great theme continues to be unwise love, the romantic vision that American rock has sold for decades now but that she is perhaps coming to understand as toxic on more than just a personal level. She still yearns for the “lime green” highs of booze and drugs, and still she yearns for the Norman Rockwell ideal of “one dream, one life, one lover.” In the past, she synthesized those two impulses with a creepy vision of daddy/girlie gender relations and a creepier romanticization of death. Now she’s chasing dignity rather than doom. The benediction-like “Mariners Apartment Complex” asks for room to air “the darkness, the deepness.” But it also issues this statement of strength: “I ain’t no candle in the wind.”
Indeed, though Del Rey still sounds very sad, her narrators—it’s best to assume that she’s not always her “I”s—are growing steelier as they prop up men who are lost and sapped in all-too-current ways. After the waltzing “How to Disappear” moves from verses about dysfunctional working-class hunks to one about having cats and a kid, the final coda (“I whisper in your ear / I’m always going to be right here / no one’s going anywhere”) represents a cry-worthy happy ending—not only because she’s found peace, but also because she can provide it for someone else. “Bartender” imagines a debutante who buys a new car for anonymity’s sake and steals away with a guy her peers would sneer at. The stunning “California”—Del Rey and Antonoff train all their power on a glorious, heaving melody—reaches out to an ex who’s spiraling. “You don’t ever have to be stronger than you really are,” she sings, a genuinely tender offering.
