Atmospheric and manic-depressive, it feels like the score to a movie that doesn’t exist. The whole thing is exploitive, and it’s easy to see why people desperately want to dislike it… but the music is oddly gorgeous, laced with soft piano chords and moody strings that ooze their way through every song like slow-moving waves of cough syrup. Lines like that are a dime a dozen on an EP that veers between come-ons (“Let me put on a show for you, daddy”) and mid-coital exclamations (“Fuck yeah, give it to me”), and Lana sings each one with sluggish sexiness, like a femme-bot whose batteries have started to short out. “My pussy tastes like Pepsi-Cola,” she informs us at one point. More often than not, though, she sticks to a deadpan delivery.
Occasionally, she flips into her head voice and trills her way around some impressive R&B riffs, and the verse of “Ride” features a lot of sultry rumblings from the lower end of her range. She plays the same character on every tune - a stoned, submissive Lolita with a taste for the darker things in life - and she does so convincingly, singing every song with a woozy coo that sounds a bit like Marilyn Monroe on opiates. Here, our femme fatale sings, swoons, and slurs her way through eight new songs that blur the lines between baby talk and dirty talk, between 1950s torch ballads and 21st century pop, between lyrics that belong in a softcore porno and string arrangements stolen from a film noire soundtrack. Paradise, a standalone EP that’s also being attached to the deluxe edition of Born to Die, is every bit as polarizing as Lana’s debut, which ignited a firestorm of accolades, accusations, and YouTube hits earlier this year. It’s “Thelma and Louise” meets grindhouse meets David Lynch, and if it doesn’t leave you feeling something - distaste, interest, arousal, confusion - then you’re about dead inside. It’s hard to be ambivalent… and if you are ambivalent, set aside 10 minutes of your life and watch the “Ride” music video, where a vamped-up Lana walks the streets of a dead-end southwestern town, gets bent over a pinball machine by a Hells Angel lookalike, holds a gun to her head while wearing an Indian headdress, and eventually becomes the queen of a biker gang.