Starlet Lana Del Rey gets forced out of the shadows and into the lime-light of stardom.  With just releasing an EP, music video for her single “Born To Die” (which goes viral), and a near-demanded/forced performance on Saturday Night Live, she’s soon ready to release her first major album, Born To Die, which sweeps the iTunes charts making the number one slot within a couple hours of it’s release.

Raw and nostalgic, Born To Die brings out and exacerbates the deepest parts of the American Dream.  And in the album you will find songs that are extremely polished, mainly featuring real instruments, and yet somehow her obvious hip-hop influences shine through… even though she’s really singing through all of it.

Through the whole album you can here big cinematic anthems and ballads of Lana Del Rey going through her memories and life-experiences.  I guess when you screwed up at a younger age, you get really good and internationally recognized stories to tell? She does.

When she first released a couple songs in a short EP “Off to the Races” was the song that naturally attracted me to her.  Its a big production of featuring huge drum sounds and orchestrated madness with Lana slaying vocals over everything.  You can feel the drama in her voice as she tries to expel the emotion, and just putting on headphones and listening to this song makes me slip into a trance that cast the illusion of being in the middle of a big Broadway production.

After a proper listen to the full LP, “National Anthem” turned out to be my favorite.  Asking to be the focus of a love affair and stating the sad fact that money is everything, the song instantly has a dark undertone. However as the chorus pops in the line “red, whites, blue in the sky. Summers’ in the air and heavens in your eye” brings on a nostalgic feeling along with the feeling that you’re being sung the chorus to by a big group of people giving it a cinematic and chilling effect.

Songs like the title track, “Born to Die” and “Carmen” bring in Del Rey’s knack for creating big, sad, and hypnotic music-traps that initially kept me entranced for hours.  “Born to Die”? Just go listen to it, its exactly what I described above.  In “Carmen” you almost get an overwhelming effect from listening to it because of the use of a fantastic story about a teenage girl who is perfect in everyones eyes, but down to the core she’s screwed up.

A bonus track on the album, Lucky Ones, sounds like it could potentially be the conclusion to the end of some major motion picture, as she uses her voice to wonder around looking back on everything she’s gone through, feeling victorious and unable to comprehend the fact that her and her loved one finally make it in life.

When it comes to Lana Del Rey’s song writing I’m very impressed;  She manages to keep everything with a certain class but that doesn’t excuse her from the fact that she’s from our generation so the appearance of slang and sometimes overly-cheesy lyrics pop up. Which for her, works.

Listen as Lana Del Rey takes you on a sonic journey through stumbling upon a tribal fire-dance in the middle of the woods, driving through the empty highway with that special someone on a summer’s day feeling free, and mystifying trances.

Overall the album stays pretty keyed in on its theme the whole time the sound only changes slightly.  With that being said, going from track to track things don’t ever get boring; Lana Del Rey’s sonorous voice glides over each one in an alluring and poetic fashion that keeps me coming back for more.  Saying that all of these songs sound too much like each other, is just one of those you can never have enough of good thing type of deals.

“Money is the reason – we exist.  Everybody knows it, it’s a fact, xx” – Lana Del Rey, National Anthem