“I’m ready to leave Los Angeles and I want you to come,” sings Lana Del Rey on her latest album Chemtrails Over the Country Club. “Eighty miles to the north or south is enough.” It is an escapist fantasy that the pop singer has entertained before: fleeing the City of Angels in a pickup truck that nobody recognizes. But, fortunately – for us, at least – she never acts according to her wishes. On Chemtrails, her most restrained and introspective album so far, she makes the soundtrack of the death of the American dream straight from the heart of Hollywood, just as she did on her previous album, the electrifying one. Norman Fucked Rockwell! And while he may not have as many grand display pieces as his older brother – there isn’t a nine-minute “bitch from Venice” to be found here – Chemtrails he is so perceptive and unaware of a cultural artifact from the award winning Cassandra of pop. After all, when the fireball passes through Hawaii towards the West Coast, as Lana predicted in NFRfrom “The Greatest”, who will be there to sing ballads about the silent, gray remains of Los Angeles? Lana Del Rey, of course. Where else would she be?
Although Del Rey’s overall project has remained remarkably consistent throughout his career, his growing disillusionment with fame and the prevailing iconography of wealth and success in this country has become greater as the national climate has become more dire. Of course, there was always danger lurking behind Kennedy’s smiles and gray mansion lunches featured in the Born to Die and his other first works; it is a characteristic that the ridiculously conspiratorial title of this album still carries. But at that time, Lana took the Shangri-Las approach, recalling motorcycle accidents and illicit cases on the beach with an innocence blinking and cooing. Even her saddest songs I have a dance remix. Not so much more. His remarks are bleak now, his melancholy set against a more substantial background. Children dance Louisiana two-step in a forgotten bar; a prolonged separation meets its bitter end; people get high and kiss in a parking lot while “the whole world is crazy”. It’s an incredibly dark feeling, but strangely comforting, all at once – the notion that someone’s personal dramas, the ups and downs of “normal” life, will continue even as the rest of the world goes to shit.
Worldliness feeds Chemtrails’ representation of American whiteness and white femininity in particular, a longstanding fascination in Del Rey’s work that has been questioned recently by his public controversies. In his infamous “Question for Culture” an open letter that she launched last spring, her point that she was making room for “women who look and act like me … the kind of woman who is ruthlessly condemned for being authentic and delicate”, got lost in the reaction that received for appearing to confront Doja Cat, Beyoncé and other pop stars of color. Chemtrails makes your case clearer: this is Del Rey’s most delicate album so far, supported by Jack Antonoff’s production having the seventies singer-songwriter brilliance NFR and reduce it to its most essential piano and guitar elements. (As with the previous album, longtime collaborator Rick Nowels enters the scene for a collaboration, the frightening folk track “Yosemite”.) The percussion takes the form of smooth bongos, live drum cymbals and almost pulsating synthesizers that are almost dissolved in the ether. . These songs are silent reflections, the kind you would play on a big baby in an empty ballroom.
Del Rey’s voice, that distinctive mid-century accent, often appears and disappears on the album’s instrumentation. Her tone remains measured and careful: “I only mention this because …” she murmurs, in two separate songs, as if she has just said something too revealing to an acquaintance. The most ostentatious display of his vocals, by far, is in the premiere of “Vestido Branco”, where Del Rey subverts the autobiographical lyrics about his pre-fame life by singing in his highest possible record, a modest parody of feminine fragility. “In Orlando, I was only 19 at Men in Music the business conference, ”she hisses, the words spilling out. (It is also a great example of Del Rey’s talent for extracting dry humor from mythology – it is unlikely that such a business conference, highlighting the distinct achievements of men in the music industry, will exist.)
In contrast, a strong current of idyllic female solidarity runs underneath Chemtrails‘boredom. “God, it’s good not to be alone,” sighs Del Rey in “Dance Till We Die”, his canyon-themed response to Le Tigre “Hot Topic,” where does she retell dancing with Joan Baez and putting out a fire in a house with Courtney Love. She draws a line between herself and Tammy Wynette’s tragic subservience in “Breaking Up Slowly”, aided by outlaw cool girl Nikki Lane, and once again pays her respects to Mother Joni with a faithful interpretation of “For Free “, ending the album with immaculate harmonies by Zella Day and Weyes Blood. For all of Del Rey’s poorly formulated defensive attitude around how many black women were portrayed in his band of debutante friends on the album cover, it just emphasized his sincere belief that such a scene could be both achievable and uncomplicated.
Del Rey’s dreams of places beyond the San Gabriel Mountains take her to more states than she has traveled in all of her other combined albums: Florida, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Arkansas (pronounced ar-KAN-sas), Louisiana , the strange land of Northern California. God and religion also play a disproportionate role, ranging from Sun Ra’s deity to a Bible tattoo to the “Tulsa Jesus Freak” who served as the singer latest muse. Del Rey has always liked the repetition of proper names – designer brands, classic rock songs, etc. – and it would be easy to ignore these new additions as merely Del Rey’s way of recognizing the most recent political climate. But it also reflects a personal evolution for Del Rey, as his external persona for the past five years has gradually shifted from his initial and provocative aesthetic from “Lolita lost on the hood” to a woman with more suburban experience, a person who is routinely claimed by his fans for having a “live, laugh, love” decor and a painting of a sailboat above his fireplace.
Whether this era of shopping dresses for Lana is just another character or really her “authentic and delicate self” will undoubtedly be a matter of debate, but it is revealing that the most cowardly desires in Chemtrails everything revolves around stability; the woman who once observed, “Kanye West is blond and gone”, now fears the irreversible damage that fame can do to a person’s psyche more than anything else. “The best have lost their minds / So I won’t change / I’ll stay the same”, she promises in “Dark but Just a Game”. Speaking to a faithful lover in “Yosemite”, she comments: “The seasons can change / But we haven’t changed”. With a career-spanning ability to freeze historical icons of culture with a single letter or video, she is now seeing if the magic trick can work on itself.
For a brief moment, yes. The growing “Wild at Heart”, the highlight of the album and one of Del Rey’s most poetic efforts to date, is a study to be content with what you already have: the music recycles its most prominent elements from various tracks found in Norman Fucked Rockwell! In the verses, Del Rey floats on a melody borrowed from “Love Song” and “Hope Is a Dangerous Thing”; she makes smoking cigarettes “to understand pollution” look positively romantic. Suddenly, the song turns into a chorus section taken directly from “How to Disappear” – the NFR band that seems to be more closely linked to Chemtrails in spirit. In this song, Del Rey imagined growing old in the California sun with “a child and two cats in the yard”. Here, we have its antithesis: Del Rey flees Calabasas in the dead of night, leaving the infernal landscape of LA in its wake. As if he were editing a film montage, his mind remembers the car accident with a paparazzi that killed Princess Diana. But on the next beat, she reassures herself: “I’m not a star”. Here, if nowhere else, it is free to be perceived.