Lana Del Rey - Mariners Apartment Complex - Single / Venice Bitch - Single [Review]

Hollywood sadcore musician Lana Del Rey has already announced a follow-up album to 2017's Lust for Life. Having been announced as titled Norman Fucking Rockwell and set to be released in early 2019, Del Rey has already released two singles from the album - "Mariners Apartment Complex" and "Venice Bitch." "Mariners Apartment Complex" is a folksy piano and acoustic guitar ballad that sounds like it could belong on the latter half of Lust for Life. There is also an instrumental break near the end of the song that calls back to the surf rock and blues rock sounds prevalent on 2014's Ultraviolence (my favorite Lana Del Rey album so far). (I am reminded especially of the song "Flipside" which is found on the Target exclusive edition of Ultraviolence.) On "Mariners Apartment Complex," Del Rey sings in her signature breathy whisper, and she also showcases her vast range, hitting both a low and a high register. Del Rey has come forth about the song's meaning, saying that it's based on an actual experience in which a guy whom she was seeing told her that he felt that they were seeing each other because of how sad that they both were, and Lana was surprised by his comment because she didn't think of herself as sad: "You took my sadness out of context," she explains in the song's opening lyric. I like "Mariners Apartment Complex" for the most part, but the main problem that I have with it is that it, more than likely coincidentally, sounds strikingly similar to the 2007 song "Where I Stood" by Missy Higgins. Aspects of the instrumentals are nearly identical, and parts of the singers' melodies are also similar. I cannot listen to "Mariners Apartment Complex" without thinking about "Where I Stood," so it is difficult for me to wholly think of it as an original song.

"Mariners Apartment Complex" features the lyric, "...your Venice bitch, your die-hard, your weakness," and this is a nod to the the second single from Norman Fucking Rockwell titled "Venice Bitch." (Considering the fact that the cover art for "Mariners Apartment Complex" features Lana wearing a shirt that says Venice Bitch and the cover art for "Venice Bitch" features a building, I wish that the covers were switched, but I digress.) I prefer "Venice Bitch" to "Mariners Apartment Complex" because the melody is beautiful in a lulling way, and the song transports me to a dreamy and otherworldly place, especially because of its warbling electric guitar. Like much of Del Rey's work, the song calls back to 1970s folk rock and also, mainly because of the aforementioned electric guitar, sounds a bit psychedelic. Something that makes "Venice Bitch" truly special is that it runs at nearly ten minutes long, making it Lana's longest running song to date. Even so, however, I am easily lost in it, and the ten minutes do not feel like ten minutes. I do think that there will probably be a shorter edit released eventually, considering the fact that it is a single and no radio station is likely to play a song that long. (Del Rey's managers even advised against this song being released as a single, but the gall that it takes to release a single this long despite being warned not to is one of several reasons why I love Lana - she breaks rules.) I already feel fairly confident that "Venice Bitch" will be one of my favorite songs on Norman Fucking Rockwell, and I can even already say that it is one of my favorite songs from her catalogue thus far. It is simply brilliant, and I cannot wait for Norman Fucking Rockwell (even though I am not too thrilled with the title because the vulgarity seems unnecessarily tacky), which, as previously stated, is supposed to drop in early 2019.