This next album is the result of giving an artist another chance. I’m not saying you should always give an artist a second chance, mind you. I ‘m just saying it worked out this time.
Disc 1512 is…. Chemtrails Over the Country Club
Artist: Lana Del Rey
Year of Release: 2021
What’s up with the Cover? Girls’ Day down at the country club. It looks like a lot of fun is happening at this table. What are they celebrating? Wedding party? (Lana is wearing white) or maybe the opposite - but equal - side of fun…the divorce party! Or maybe these gals just meet every Saturday afternoon at the club to share some margheritas and a few laughs.
How I Came To Know It: After trying and never quite getting Lana Del Rey early in her career, I finally came around after re-listening to Norman Fucking Rockwell. I realized (albeit belatedly) that it was the masterpiece the critics said it was. It was only my general distrust of anything too popular that had held me back. I’m such an idiot that way.
Anyway, this epiphany (about Lana Del Ray specifically, not my iconoclastic idiocy) happened earlier this year, around the same time Del Rey released Chemtrails Over the Country Club. Now, better tuned in to her sound, and suitably chastened, I gave it a listen with eyes unclouded by preconceived notions. I liked it.
I’ve since dug into her back catalogue and found a couple earlier albums I’m now searching for.
How It Stacks Up: At present I only have two Lana Del Rey albums. Of those two, I put “Chemtrails Over the Country Club” in at #2.
Ratings: 3 stars
Lana Del Rey is the music of Hollywood glamour, if Hollywood glamour had something deep and insightful to say. “Chemtrails Over the Country Club” is her reveling in her fame and fortune, but with a healthy appreciation of just how ephemeral fame can be, and nostalgia for a simpler life before that fame existed.
The album is book-ended by this exploration. The opening track, “White Dress” has Del Rey reminiscing about days of waitressing. Del Rey turns the notion of a woman feeling invisible serving drinks at the “Men in the Music Business Conference” on its head, making the song about the free and heady experience of young sexual power. Sung in Del Rey’s signature melodic whisper, it is a song that demonstrates her breezy confidence and (to borrow from a previous record) her lust for life.
The album closes with a cover of Joni Mitchell’s “For Free,” performed with fellow chanteuses Zella Day and Weyes Blood. In the song, a now-famous artist appreciates a street busker on a clarinet. On “White Dress” the narrator is working at a fancy hotel, but in “For Free” she’s now staying in one, riding in limousines and living the good life. As she pulls away, she contemplates the ephemeral and often unfair nature of fame:
“Nobody stopped to hear him
Though he played so sweet and high
They knew he had never been on the TV
So they passed his music by”
In between these explorations of fame, Del Rey is happy to fill the record with what may be deep personal confessionals or may just be invented characters; I was never 100% sure which (hint: it doesn’t matter). The album has the lush resonance that all her albums possess to one degree or another, but it is more sparse, similar to “Norman Fucking Rockwell” although not as consistently strong.
One of the stand outs is the sexy and vulnerable, “Let Me Love You Like a Woman”, which lilts along like the slowest sexiest dance you could ever imagine. Think a perfect waltz frame from the waist up, but with the lascivious brushing of things as the dancers take their slow turn around the floor.
Del Rey doubles down on the sexy vibe with “Yosemite” a love of passion without regret, followed immediately by a duet with Nikki Lane called “Breaking Up Slowly” which somehow makes breaking up just as sexy as staying together. Takes me back to that album art – wedding or divorce? We don’t know, but Lana Del Rey is all in for the experience either way.
Like “Norman Fucking Rockwell” most of the songs on “Chemtrails…” are cowritten by Jack Antonoff. Antonoff does the cowriting gig a lot, and I want it to bug me. However, he has worked on some of the best pop records out there in the last few years (in addition to NFR, he has produced and cowritten parts of Taylor Swift’s “Folkore”, and St. Vincent’s “Masseduction”). That is one hell of a resume.
“Chemtrails Over the Country Club” is a step behind those records, but it is still a well-measured mix of old Hollywood elegance, seventies pop and the sexy siren vocals that are a Lana Del Rey original.
Best tracks: White Dress, Let Me Love You Like a Woman, Yosemite, Breaking Up Slowly, For Free
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