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Jan 30, 2012A delicious hybrid of Portishead and Nancy Sinatra.
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Feb 10, 2012At times, notably in Born to Die's first half, it's a little too perfect, with songs meticulous to the point where they become sterile, but when it starts to find form, I can't think of an album since My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy that was this big and sounded this good.
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Jan 26, 2012It's brilliantly realised, thanks to Del Rey's extraordinary delivery, her ability to slip from deep-toned haughtiness to breathless ecstasy to velvety vamping – often in the same gorgeous melody.
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MojoFeb 27, 2012Tune out the background media noise and immerse yourself. [Mar 2012, p.94]
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Q MagazineFeb 21, 2012Confirms her as the most compelling new pop star around: half doomed romantic, half mordant cynic, with a distinctively conflicted vision of how love, fame and America work. [Mar 2012, p.94]
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Feb 10, 2012Born To Die may ultimately prove too-blinkered a vision to fully appeal to the Sheeran-loving public in the long run, but Lana has certainly proved that she's not just here to play games.
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Feb 7, 2012Although it's not quite the perfect pop record 'Video Games' might have led us to wish for, Born To Die still marks the arrival of a fresh--and refreshingly self-aware--sensibility in pop.
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Jan 30, 2012What Born to Die isn't is the thing Lana Del Rey seems to think it is, which is a coruscating journey into the dark heart of a troubled soul... What it is, is beautifully turned pop music, which is more than enough.
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Jan 27, 2012Born to Die is a brilliant album, but it's one that leaves room for a few improvements, and inspires confidence that they'll happen.
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Jan 27, 2012Inevitably, 51 minutes of melodrama becomes draining. But it captures Del Rey's mystique perfectly.
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Jan 25, 2012One of the more cohesive pop albums in recent memory.
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Feb 16, 2012Whatever the circumstances have been in Lana's rise to fame, all that doesn't detract from the captivating quality of the songs on Born To Die.
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Feb 10, 2012Stop analysing too far, and what you end up with is a genuine contender.
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Feb 7, 2012Born to Die has more hits than misses and more solidly strange fabulously femme fatale interludes than naff ones.
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Jan 30, 2012Whole thing sounds like a poppy Bond soundtrack remixed for the clubs, although even her faster songs sound slow.
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Jan 30, 2012Lynchian undercoat aside...it's basically just a good old massive pop album, which can be a scary thing in its own right: the air of soulless, monolithic power and the unseen presence of shadowy string-pullers etc.
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Jan 30, 2012Sure, they may borderline on gimmick at times, but Born To Die has its own sound, and that is more than we can say about a lot of music that is presently being released.
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Feb 1, 2012Highly listenable pop songs that defy easy answers. The persona has its moments too.
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Feb 10, 2012So the question becomes, is Born to Die more good than bad, or vice versa? Let's err with the former, hype be damned.
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Feb 2, 2012After that highpoint ["Video Games"] things head downhill quickly.
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Feb 1, 2012It all sounds very immaturely polished.
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Jan 30, 2012There's just enough promise here to show that there is indeed talent beyond all the hype.
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Jan 30, 2012Lana Del Rey's partying is fuelled by a knowing sadness, and sung in that laconic, hypnotic voice, which ultimately saves this thoroughly dissolute, feminist nightmare of a record for the romantics among us.
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Jan 30, 2012Even the terrible parts of Born to Die are just so lovable, which bodes well for the actually great parts.
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Jan 27, 2012The worst thing about Born To Die is that even its great songs contain problems.
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Jan 27, 2012All tabloid tawdriness aside, she unleashes some truly A-level songs. But its baffling failures drop Die to a middling, maddening C+.
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Jan 30, 2012For all of its coos about love and devotion, it's the album equivalent of a faked orgasm-- a collection of torch songs with no fire.
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Feb 28, 2012Spread over 12 songs, Del Rey becomes so ordinary, even bland, that no amount of little girl vocals or pouting can save her.
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Jan 31, 2012Her debut is mediocre at best. At worst, it's as uninspired and repetitive as her internet commentators.
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Jan 30, 2012There is a chasm that separates "Video Games" from the other material and performances on the album, which aims for exactly the same target--sultry, sexy, wasted--but with none of the same lyrical grace, emotional power, or sympathetic productions.
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Jan 27, 2012After all the hub-bub of recent weeks, one of Lee's greatest songs sums up Del Rey's grand entrance: "Is That All There Is?"
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Feb 3, 2012A deeply, deeply flawed meditation on love, image, and fame in the 21st century, and a collection of ideas thrown at the wall to see what sticks.
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Feb 2, 2012Much of her music aims to capture elusive emotions, yet she ends up spelling them out with literal refrains, banal narratives and sexed-up histrionics that leave little to the imagination.
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Jan 30, 2012Given her chic image, it's a surprise how dull, dreary and pop-starved Born to Die is.
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Jan 27, 2012In song after song, she offers variants on the same theme, in infatuated erotic reveries of submission to bad-boy or sugar-daddy lovers with fast cars and lots of money.
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Feb 1, 2012Shallow and overwrought, with periodic echoes of Ke$ha's Valley Girl aloofness, the album lives down to the harshest preconceptions against pop music.
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Feb 3, 2012I have done my best to place the album, as a series of utterances, in its agony and vacuity.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 2,089 out of 2350
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Mixed: 80 out of 2350
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Negative: 181 out of 2350
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Jan 31, 2012
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Jan 31, 2012
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Jan 31, 2012