On her sixth album with a major label, “Chemtrails Over the Country Club”, Lana Del Rey wants to get away from it all.
After her great 2019 California-centered epic, “Norman _____ Rockwell!”, Maybe she’s just wishing for a change of scenery: “I’m ready to leave LA and I want you to come,” she announces on the first single from the new album. , “Let me love you like a woman”. Checking the names of other “Chemtrails” songs stops on a trip to the Midwest, from Yosemite to Lincoln and Tulsa. But in some of the most exciting moments on the record, Del Rey seems to want an even greater spiritual feeling of forgetfulness: “I’m in the wind, I’m in the water, nobody’s son, nobody’s daughter”, she sings on the scary title track, sounding happily no strings attached. During the album’s opening number, “White Dress,” she did a pirouette at the top edge of her vocal record, her airy falsetto evaporating in the space around her like a fleeting and soon-to-be-unreadable piece of writing in the sky. .
One of several stunning albums, “White Dress” is a melancholy poem with a piano tone that evokes the emotional intensity of Cat Power and reimagines a “simpler time” when the narrator was a 19-year-old night shift waitress in – from everywhere in America by Norman Rockwell – Orlando, Florida. But she was happy, capable: “When I was a waitress, wearing a white dress, look at how I do it, look at how I got it.” The weather is quiet, and the song saves some of its most touching revelations – “it kind of makes me feel like I might be better” – for its final disturbing moments.
From the moment he emerged with the semi-anachronistic song “Video Games” in 2011, Del Rey has always called himself an old soul. Like much of his music, “Chemtrails” usually bends backwards to cling to an indescribable and unrecoverable pre-Caparian state. (As she put it in one of her best songs, the unofficial 2019 hymn “The Greatest”, “nobody warns you before autumn”.) Sometimes the past she glorifies is mass cultural (the dumb, subtly self-conscious) tuned “Tulsa Jesus Freak” undermines a Manson family aesthetic similar to Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood”), but just as often on this album it is distinctly personal, longing for lost time when making music was a hobby carefree and not Del Trabalho de Rey. Throughout the process, “Chemtrails” finds her meditating on the value of her art, wondering if it is too late to return to the garden.
Fame is the album’s recurring boogeyman, most explicitly in the languid “Dark but Just a Game”, which Del Rey said is named after something her producer Jack Antonoff told her while reflecting on the tragic fate of many stars. (“Chemtrails” brings Del Rey together with Antonoff, who co-produced “Norman” with her and once again gives his undulating voice the appropriate amount of compositional space.) “Cameras have flashes, they cause car accidents”, she sings in the gently growing “Wild at Heart” – another highlight. On two other occasions, she makes reference to “Vela ao Vento”, that popular culture elegy that Elton John hardly needed to reformulate to fit the fate of Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana.
However easy it is to forget, however, the blue sign in particular over the country club is hardly the entire sky. This finite perspective makes “Chemtrails” a lesser offering than “Norman _____ Rockwell!”, Which has undergone major fluctuations and has often connected, capturing something that had been difficult to articulate about the great sense of unease of its generation. Perhaps to avoid repetition, “Chemtrails” discovers that Del Rey is decreasing, seeking a more insular view.
When all of her virtues are working together – rich melodies, composition surprises, just-Lana-I would say-the catch phrases – Del Rey’s music casts an engaging spell. But in the moments when their times and timbres become a little repetitive, as they did on their sleepy 2015 album “Honeymoon” and do for a stretch of several songs in the middle of this album, their limitations come into focus. “Not All Who Wander Are Lost” builds a chorus around the wisdom of the sticker, while vague lyrics like “let me love you like a woman, let me hug you like a baby” lack the specificity of your best songs.
At best, Del Rey’s hyper-referential music convincingly recreates the particular feeling of finding art in a postmodern era, when the past is so crammed with valuable cultural artifacts that everything new resembles, at least a little, something old. But while she dances on the fine line between evoking and meaning, Del Rey sometimes risks outsourcing her depth to things that other artists have said more vividly before.
That’s the bet of finishing an album with a cover by Joni Mitchell – although here it is a risk Del Rey taking a risk. In a beautiful version, reverent and animated by the harmony of “For Free”, she is accompanied by musicians Zella Day and Natalie Mering (who records as Weyes Blood), and in Mitchell’s speeches she finds echoes with many of the questions she has reflected the relative value of art and the distortions of fame. The song comes from Mitchell’s 1970 LP “Ladies of the Canyon”, but if “Chemtrails” has a soul mate in Mitchell’s discography, it is “For the Roses” from 1972, his own album “coming out of Los Angeles”, which Mitchell composed in the solitude of his stone house on the British Columbia sun coast.
At the end of “Chemtrails”, however, Del Rey found solace not in solitude, but in solidarity, specifically with other women. The album regains momentum in its final trio of songs, which are suddenly populated by other female voices and names. (In addition to Day and Mering in “For Free”, Del Rey is accompanied by country artist Nikki Lane in a song Lane wrote, “Breaking Up Slowly”.) Louisiana two-step night with an imaginary clique of her musical heroes, some of which (Stevie Nicks, Joan Baez) Del Rey has toured or collaborated with. “God, it’s good not to be alone,” she exhales, just before the faint, lonely sound of a horn blows into the mix, as if it were from another bar down the road. Momentarily, he leaves his mark on the blue and, just as quickly, disappears.
Lana Del Rey
“Chemtrails Over the Country Club”
(Interscope)