Pssst, don’t know if you’ve heard, but Lana Del Rey is a fraud. From lips to name, she’s a fake. What’s more, she’s co-written her album with an assortment of industry guns for hire. Disgusting, isn’t it? Though, given the faltering performance on Saturday Night Live, it’s safe to assume that she’s not pulling a Milli Vanilli and does at least sing.

These and the assorted other revelations about Lana Del Rey may have left you feeling duped. If so, you’d best sit down because, one, there’s something you should know about Santa Claus and, two, you’re an idiot who can’t be trusted to stand under your own volition.

We live in an artificial world. We are all complicit in it, projecting a version, or versions, of ourselves to the outside world, adopting different personae for different people. We are all concerned by appearance, all performing to an audience. We edit our life story via social media, excising our faults and foibles, suppressing our true feelings, creating a narrative that is acceptable to ourselves and others – ‘this isn’t me as I am, but as I want you to think I am’.

If you were socked in the gut by ‘Video Games’, if ‘Born To Die’ stirred something real in you, is that not enough? It’s a rhetorical question. Given this, who – besides some hipster Holden Caulfields – would dare label a musician phony, or would care that they’ve – shock horror – reinvented themselves? To paraphrase the great Bill Hicks, if you’re offended by the inauthentic in music, do me a favour, go home and take all your albums, all your vinyl and CDs and burn them.

After all, the myth-making attentions of a good PR team can take a musician so far, but, ultimately, it’s the quality of the music that determines whether or not the public’s interest wanes after the wave of hype subsides. Born To Die then is the point at which we get to pull back the curtain and see if Lana Del Rey is as magical as we’ve been led to believe, or crushingly ordinary.

Overall, this is a beautifully crafted, if limited, album, its ensemble cast of writers – in particular Justin Parker – helping set the stage for all manner of lovelorn drama. And Del Rey plays her part(s) with aplomb. Her tear-sodden vocal, retro image and backstory all evoke that Hollywood roll-call of the beautiful and doomed, the girls who changed their birth name and came to the movie Mecca to lose themselves. Girls like Mae Murray, known as ‘The girl with the bee stung lips’ – a silent-film era star who ended her life in poverty – Barbara La Marr ‘The girl who is too beautiful’ – dead at 29 of tuberculosis and nephritis. And then there’s Del Rey’s namesake, Lana Turner; no stranger to heartache, Turner married eight times to seven different husbands.

The overriding theme of the album is best summed-up by the opening lines of ‘Diet Mountain Dew’,

“You’re no good for me
Baby you’re no good for me
You’re no good for me
But baby I want you
I want you”

Del Rey wallows in her misery, her narcotics-deadened vocal relaying the ways in which relationships can go wrong, telling us how unrequited love can sting and her “old man is a bad man”. By the album’s end, the constant ‘oh, woe is me’ attitude begins to wear and you may find yourself imploring, ‘build a bridge Lana and get over it’. After all, clouds need their silver linings.

However, what does surprise is that there are a clutch of tunes here that, if not reaching the same heights as ‘Video Games’, prove almost as dizzying. The sultry twang of ‘Blue Jeans’ and doom-laden air of ‘Born To Die’ will be familiar, but ‘Carmen’ too finds Del Rey inhabiting her role with real flair. She’s a femme fatale adored by boys and girls alike – possibly modelled on Jeanne Carmen, a one-time pin-up girl, burlesque dancer, B-movie actor and, it was rumoured, the lover of Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Clark Gable and Errol Flynn. Strings weep, guitar aches and Del Rey breathily relates her alarming tale. It’s sublime.

‘Radio’ has a similarly glorious vocal melody, its sugar-spun chorus compensating for the self-pitying lyric. ‘Summertime Sadness’ meanwhile reprises the velveteen lushness and luxurious sense of space that worked so well on ‘Video Games’. Its plunking guitar recalls Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks score and the sound is rounded out by clattering drums and swooning strings.

Then there’s ‘National Anthem’ which, despite a lyric that should have been Tippexed into oblivion, boasts a soar-away chorus, whilst ‘Dark Paradise’ has a winning swagger, its plump beats and extravagant orchestration making cosy bedfellows. Unfortunately, just like Paz De La Huerta in the promo for ‘Video Games’, there are ugly missteps. ‘Diet Mountain Dew’ is a sickly concoction of simpering vocal, plastic beats and a melody that stubbornly fails to ignite and ‘Off To The Races’ – despite Del Rey’s coquettish vocal and some half-hearted hip-hop stylings – recalls only Betty Boo.

‘Born To Die’ is flawed, then, but it’s also the place where “American dreams came true somehow” and the artist formerly known as plain old Lizzy Grant convincingly reinvented herself as music’s premiere vamp, the enthralling Lana Del Rey. Francis Jones

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KEY  TRACKS: ‘RADIO’, ‘CARMEN’, ‘SUMMERTIME SADNESS’.
FOR FANS OF: CHRIS ISAAK, JULIE LONDON, LAURA PALMER.