Making a name

Generally speaking, members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame need no introduction. So the title of the new album by the 2011 inductee Darlene Love, Introducing Darlene Love (Wicked Cool/Columbia) would seem to be tongue-in-cheek.

It isn’t. Due to her producer Phil Spector’s machinations, Love often went uncredited on her hits and thus remained lesser known during the 1960s than she should have been. And for most of the following decades, she recorded nothing at all, effectively receding from public memory.

Love turned 74 in July. Yet she sings as powerfully as she did at 21 (the age at which she sang lead on The Crystals’ “He’s a Rebel”) or at 22 (the age at which she sang lead on “Christmas [Baby Please Come Home]”). Unsurprisingly, her delivery of the line “I’m going to make sure you remember my name” from Track 10 of her new album doesn’t sound tongue-in-cheek at all.

Featuring new compositions by Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, and Jimmy Webb, Introducing Darlene Love takes great pains to present Love in her trademark “wall of sound” element. The results don’t feel cluttered because the producer is Steven Van Zandt, who as a longtime member of Springsteen’s E Street Band understands a thing or two about epic pop. He even gets a “River Deep, Mountain High” out of Love that rivals Phil Spector’s Tina Turner–sung original.

But Van Zandt also commits, or at least facilitates, several stylistic gaffes. Joan Jett’s “Little Liar,” for instance, remains a young rocker’s tune. And, whether because of her age or her dignity or both, Love sounds unconvincing selling the bedroom-eyes sensuality of Costello’s “Forbidden Nights” and Linda Perry’s “Love Kept Us Foolin’ Around.” As for the generic protest of the Van Zandt–composed “Among the Believers,” it flails aimlessly, eventually petering out in an accumulation of clichés and unclear pronoun referents.

At least Introducing Darlene Love finishes strong. The penultimate track is Walter Hawkins’ “Marvelous,” a reverently exuberant gospel song that begins “I will sing your praise / For you’ve done such a marvelous thing.” And the final track, “Jesus Is the Rock (That Keeps Me Rollin’),” is six minutes of infectious revival fervor that Van Zandt composed by tapping into his knowledge of, and respect for, Love’s Baptist roots—or at least his knowledge of, and respect for, Unconditional Love, the excellent all-gospel album that Love recorded in 1998 and that is still in print.

A far subtler reference to the Christian faith occurs midway through Honeymoon (Interscope), the latest album by the pop-noir chanteuse Lana Del Rey.

In keeping with Del Rey’s 2014 LP Ultraviolence, Honeymoon evokes the shadowy and ephemeral aspects of romantic attraction in the Age of Anything Goes. So narcotically breathy are Del Rey’s singing and her accompanying soundscapes that one might well take her intoxication wishes in “High by the Beach” (the song, incidentally, that earns Honeymoon its explicit-lyrics label) at face value.

Out of keeping with Ultraviolence, Honeymoon spikes its proceedings with a verbatim “interlude” from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.

Lasting just one minute and 21 seconds, “Burnt Norton (Interlude)” accounts for less than three percent of Honeymoon’s one-hour-and-five-minutes duration. But, as the eighth of Honeymoon’s 14 tracks, it simultaneously divides the album in half and unites the halves with the beginning lines of one of the 20th century’s greatest Christian poems.

It also opens the following song, “Religion,” to interpretations undreamt of in the philosophies of those other quasi-religious pop-noir chanteuses Sinéad O’Connor and Madonna.