mentioned upthread, thought i'd dump this here...hmm:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/08/a...ballroom-review.html?scp=1&sq=lana del&st=cse
Finally Taking the Stage, Direct From the Internet
By JON CARAMANICA
Lana Del Rey is a singer of songs that are very popular on the Internet. Stop. Rewind. That’s not quite it. Let’s try again.
Lana Del Rey is a person who makes music that is much discussed online. O.K., that’s closer, but still not there. A music-making thing? Nah. One more time.
Lana Del Rey is a tabula rasa, a punching bag, a reflection of our collective nightmares about American cynicism and disingenuousness. Sure, that’ll do.
Really Ms. Del Rey is a singer, sometimes a very good one, who wouldn’t deserve the degree of scrutiny she’s been subjected to online, even if she were far worse, or far better. In her current incarnation, she’s released exactly three songs, which all would sound fine in a Tarantino film or in an Urban Outfitters or in the lobby of the Ace Hotel. (She is releasing an album next month.)
That she in fact performed at all on Monday night at the Bowery Ballroom, in her first proper New York show, qualifies as a victory of sorts. (There was also a short, unadvertised set at the Glasslands Gallery in Williamsburg in September.) The Internet has not yet killed Ms. Del Rey.
But oh, is it trying, with a combination of skepticism about her motives and skepticism about her appearance and skepticism about her identity. Last year, under her given name, Lizzy Grant, she released a benign album of misty, semi-baroque singer-songwriter pop. But everything about Ms. Del Rey’s current phase is carefully plotted: it’s woozy and sometimes soporific soundtrack soul, glued firmly in the mid-1960s, with debts to Nancy Sinatra and Dusty Springfield.
At this show she came onstage to the nervous strings of the “Psycho” theme, and she was backed by dusty old footage displayed on three large white balloons, including several clips of President John F. Kennedy. Like her video for “Video Games,” the song that placed her in the line of fire this summer, it looked like the montage clip at your uncle’s retirement party.
Still, Ms. Del Rey can’t help feeling like another in an endless stream of sonic rediscoveries and repurposings facilitated by Internet access and distribution: Lana Del Rey is baile funk! is chopped and screwed! is doom metal!
Ms. Del Rey also follows the example of Amy Winehouse, another singer who took vintage styles and packed them with modern lyrical moments: She likes to curse, but only in contrast to her otherwise smooth demeanor and presentation. She wore a demure white dress here, with mustard collar and rosette-studded belt, and her hair was sprayed into a hard shell.
Backed by a band that too often mistook lethargy for melancholy, she proved herself to be far more active as an Internet meme than as a human being onstage. It felt like a rehearsal. Maybe it was.
“I have no time to practice, so I’m practicing with you,” she said. It wasn’t an apology.
And what a relief that was. Ms. Del Rey has a bad, maybe even terrible, attitude underneath the pristine exterior, and it’s trying to claw its way out.
At her best moments, she gave glimmers of being a Fiona Apple manquée — the voice, yes, was almost there, but the orneriness, the potential for rupture, is very much there already. She was chafing against the amber she’s trapped in.
After one song she said, “I’m not gonna lie — I’m not feeling that song lately.” After another, one that has not yet been the subject of Talmudic dissection on the Internet, she snipped: “I know you don’t care. You’re gonna” — really, except choosing a more emphatic word — “like it when it’s on the record.”
Clearly, she wants to be something different, but for now she’ll take just being something.
“I’m not doing an encore,” she said, “so don’t think I’m coming back.” And she didn’t.