On her fifth or sixth album, Lana Del Rey goes for a widescreen version of Seventies singer-songwriter soft rock, and gets as close as she’s ever gotten to transcendence while also offering some of her funniest, most acerbic lines (“God damn, man-child/You fucked me so good I almost said ‘I love you’”; “They mistook my kindness for weakness/I fucked up, I know that, but Jesus/Can’t a girl just do the best she can?”). Amid the gently picked acoustic guitars and romantic strings, there are moments of genuine weirdness, like the second half of the nearly 10-minute “Venice Bitch,” much of which is taken up by a squiggly prog-AOR synth solo. Then there’s the fact that she calls a song “Cinnamon Girl” that owes exactly nothing to Neil Young, but offers an earnest cover of Sublime’s “Doin’ Time,” not changing a single word of the lyrics and thereby indicating with perfect clarity which artist means more to her.

– Phil Freeman