Lana Del Rey - Chemtrails Over The Country Club (2021)

i know i'm in the minority here but i think chemtrails is her best. there's not really anything on the new one that i would have liked to have had on chemtrails, the tracks i am fond of here wouldn't have really fit too well.

nfr! was decent but its reputation already seems ridiculous to me. it leads with a few great tracks before spending most of the album just being fine - this was certainly a victory considering how inconsistent most of her past work had been but chemtrails improves upon it, much more consistently reaching nfr's highs & being a reasonable length for once.

My first listen of "Dealer", I thought "this is the kind of music I'd imagine Karen Black making". I googled "lana del rey" "karen black" and there was only one prior comparison, written by a Grantland writer, saying "if Lana Del Rey doesn't love [Five Easy Pieces'] Rayette Dipesto, I'll eat my makeup." Then I searched for Karen Black recordings, having only heard "Dreams Come True Girl" with Cass McCombs, and discovered that Cass finished and released a posthumous Karen Black album just a few months ago. I'm listening to it now and it doesn't sound anything like "Dealer". Sounds good though!

Really love the horns that come in on "If You Lie Down With Me"

Yes it's a nice touch. And it resonates with the Trap Morricone bit.
At this point there are about 10 tracks that I like a lot on this album.

10 tracks probably would’ve been the ideal length for this album.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYqky795R1s

well this is the most interesting thing she's done in a while, idk if it really works though

This interview was intermittently interesting.

EILISH: I’m really curious, and you can feel free to say fuck off, but you are so romanticized online, specifically different eras of you and your music and your visuals. You were always the coolest of the cool in my world, but I was wondering if having older versions of yourself romanticized later in life might give you this feeling of, “When I was doing that, you guys did not give me that same validation and gratification.”

DEL REY: Yes. I was thinking about this last night actually, if it’s better to be initiated into that club where it’s like, “She’s wonderful,” right away. Once things grew on YouTube, I expected that there was going to be this very niche lane where I knew that I could thrive, but it didn’t really go that way. I quickly shifted right into the middle lane where everyone could see it and could hear the music. As soon as that happened, I knew I was in for it, but I didn’t know to what extent. In the beginning, I was following the mantra: “It’s all about how you feel, not about what other people think.” I had never thought that one day Bruce Springsteen would say something like, “I think she’s one of the most beautiful American songwriters” after Sasha Frere-Jones said, “Change your name, change your face, and try a new career,” and Jon Caramanica was going off about whatever—this was in The New Yorker and New York magazine, and I lived in New York. All of a sudden, I was walking down the street as I always did, and people would throw elbows at me. I was like, “Oh my god, no way did that actually happen. Someone recognized me and gave me a shove.” Or in San Francisco, I was eating at a bistro and a woman threw a book about feminism at my face. I thought I was completely in for it. I thought that all I could do was just keep touring. So, I toured for nine years and kept my head down. I didn’t think anything could ever get elevated to the point where, for instance, Interview magazine would say, “You’re on the cover.” Even still, it’s like, “Really?”

I’d love to see the article in which SFJ said anything like that about her. The only NYer piece about her that I can recall from those days is https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/02/06/screen-shot

Misremembering or self mythologizing, either way, A&W is the most interesting thing she’s done in a while, and on that level it works great for me, but I agree w/ ufo, no idea if it works-works.

Hm, that's funny, I don't see "But anyway I misread something Ann Powers said once and essentially sicced my fans on her" in that paragraph.

Eilish couldn't have tiptoed more deferentially into that question.

The whole piece is "Lana Del Rey fawned over by a teenage fan."

I‘ve liked both these new tracks (shocking). I agree the new one may not quite “work,” but it keeps me listening. The transition/breakdown bit reminds me of that Lorde track “Hard Feelings/Loveless”…

“You can really hear the Antonoff!”

https://www.thewrap.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/oh-hello-nick-kroll-john-mulaney-620x400.jpeg

I find myself in the disorienting position of highly anticipating a Lana Del Rey album

after Sasha Frere-Jones said, “Change your name, change your face, and try a new career,” and Jon Caramanica was going off about whatever

…Maybe she was thinking of the closing lines from this (weird) Caramanica piece that I just came across, and was misremembering it as SFJ?:

A career founded on bad faith all around can’t be long for this world, but at this point what can Ms. Del Rey do? Not much. Her cultural stamp has already been affixed, her biography written in concrete. The only real option is to wash off that face paint, muss up that hair and try again in a few years. There are so many more names out there for the choosing.

i feel like there was a terrible SFJ piece on LDR at some point but maybe that's just something that really seems like it should be true but isn't? idk

Oh wow this single !
I didn’t care about the previous single but already love this one, especially the extended chanting coda.

It takes too long to simmer but yeah adore that second half

this is a good song. this seems like the fourth album now where she's just decided she's going to do whatever the fuck she wants to do.

I just thought that this track is a kind of more realized follow up to “Arcadia/the trio”, with a more developed and satisfying trap/heavy beat part. I also prefer the ballad part actually.

I've listened to Blue Banisters a few times over the past few days... there's some very good stuff there, I admit I stopped paying attn after NFR!. She seems to be doing things similar in approach to some of her "peers," whom I have always far preferred, but she's actually doing it better(?!)

The albums gets a bit soporific, especially when it hits the string of piano tracks at the end (an hour-plus of slow Lana songs is a lot), but even those are good. I guess it's kind of a mismash of stuff from different eras?

Her vocal style has always been Obstacle 1 for me (to appropriate an old Interpol joke), but it seems like she's changed it up? I do really like her singing on this newer stuff.

(I've also given Chemtrails a few spins now, but nothing grabs my ear on that one... it's a snooze.)

love the title track, love “white dress”

The "Down at the Men in Music Business Conference" part of White Dress has (unexpected) Fiery Furnaces vibes...

“White dress” is fantastic. It almost make me go back to roller skating !

I prefer Chemtrails to Blue Banisters, though BB may suffer just for coming along so quickly before I had moved on from the earlier album

"Dealer" -> "Thunder" (on Banisters) is some hot sh1t!

yeah those are some great tracks on bannisters. I think bannisters did get short shrift; it's kind of a mopping up album, some of the songs on it are from earlier sessions, and of course she then went off social media around the time it was released. she doesn't seem to have really returned either except with a private instagram account. I've heard rumors she will no longer tour either. Good for her.

First 30 seconds of the new track remind me of something and it's bugging me. Thought it might be a Radiohead track or something from a soundtrack, but can't place it.

This?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbVKGlh3gg4

Sorry to rhapsodize, but "Thunder" has the kind of melody that I feel like I've been waiting to hear my whole life – it just falls into place; like I can't tell if it sounds like some combination of great songs from the past, or is entirely original, but it doesn't even matter.

It's the kind of track that's so ridiculously good, it makes me wonder what it must be like for the artist & songwriters/producers to listen back to it in the studio, and realize, "Yeah, that's a song we made..." (Not to mention casually deciding – "guess I'll make it, oh, track 9 or 10 on the album..." lol).

Worked out what the intro to A&W reminded me of. There’s a Radiohead connection via James Lavelle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mh92yoebuhM

I'm still heavily into Banisters (to the point of distraction)... dipping back thru her catalog, it really seems like she doesn't have many other songs like these(?) I was surprised to learn that three of the tracks date all the way back to 2014 (like, the actual recordings themselves); b/c they sure seem distinct from the stuff she actually released back then, and wrote with some of the same folks.

Today, as I worked on my taxes, I dutifully queued up Born to Die (Paradise Edition), Ultraviolence, and Honeymoon (that's a lot of Lana!)... and even with my ears "primed" and wanting to enjoy it (like, "gimme more!"), I just couldn't find much I would want to return to. Maybe the production is throwing off my ear somehow? – it doesn't help that a lot of those tracks are smeared with gobs of dusky trip-hop beats. But I'm still coming away feeling like she saved this extra special material to be tacked onto the back half her 2nd album of 2021, where they'd fit perfectly with a suite of terrific new songs, as weird as that sounds. (Not to mention the two amazing tracks in the middle, which apparently came from an aborted collab with a UK band in 2017...)

Boy, Lust for Life is really not a good album! Talk about an artist not playing to their strengths…

it's half a good album I think. the more pop moments don't do much for me at all and I get the feeling they didn't do much for her either.

I don't mind LFL. Honeymoon gets taxing.

I really like the drum sound on "Love" from LFL. The whole album sounds underwater half the time.

Yeah, the production style really doesn't seem to work (unrelated - this final song, "Get Free," sounds like she listened to Radiohead's "Creep" while writing the verse melody)

this final song, "Get Free," sounds like she listened to Radiohead's "Creep" while writing the verse melody

iirc there was a bit of controversy when this came out and her people said it was just a coincidence. given that her music is an i-spy of music references, we all know it was intentional

Same chord changes, but the melody is different enough for deniability.

...and Radiohead took those chords from "The Air That I Breathe" anyway.

Yeah, the production style really doesn't seem to work

Oh, I meant underwater as a compliment.

...and Radiohead took those chords from "The Air That I Breathe" anyway.

Huh, I had forgotten about that... considering that song was on an album called It Never Rains in Southern California, seems like there could be a kind of deep meta-connection there.

A few more thoughts for my LDR Blog (as I've been listening to pretty much only older Lana for the past week, to break up my repeated spins of Banisters):

1. It's interesting how her vocal phrasing and bits of her songwriting can recall other artists, such as Gaga or Taylor... based on my casual contact w/LDR, I had the sense of her being sort of sui generis, but it turns out she fits right into the cultural pocket of the past decade (and I don't mean this in a negative way, like any of these artists are copying each other – just that she's more squarely "contemporary" than I had realized).
2. I had underrated Lust for Life a bit on first listen... it actually may be more interesting album overall than the few before it, and has a few particularly good songs. I do think that mode of going for an overtly pop-forward approach (with rap features, etc.) wasn't a productive path; she loses some of her distinctiveness here.
3. Her choices of cover songs seem really bad to me! They're either too on-the-nose ("Blue Velvet," lol), or just things that I do not want to hear (though I know "Doin' Time" hit it big, so I guess that worked out).
4. Banisters is still so head & shoulders above the rest for me, and I'll stop talking about it, but it feels remarkable to encounter a "where did these songs come from??" kind of album, so deep in an artist's catalog. NFR! was clearly an artistic turning point – then it feels like took a few tries, or maybe a happy accident with the right collaborators, and suddenly she hits it out of the park...

As far as I'm concerned, "Dealer" and "White Dress" are two of the best songs ever recorded by an A-list artist

Something remarkable about "Dealer" is how it has five credited songwriters (which is totally fine for a song, no shade on that) – but it feels like a single, perfectly executed idea.

I wish I had the vocabulary to talk about how other songs on Banisters's first half have a sort of tentative, resistant feel, with the cymbal lagging behind the beat... and Lana's almost pulling the song forward with her vocal, like she's fighting against inertia, until her voice breaks with the effort ("Black Bathing Suit" exemplifies this).

I had never listened to Blue Banisters until tonight, and...holy fuck, this album is amazing. Her voice is so different on "Dealer" I went to Wikipedia to see if it was a guest vocalist. But she's singing completely differently from the style I expect from her all over this record. And the arrangements are brilliant. The horns on "Arcadia"...

It's a shame Blue Banisters came out so quickly after Chemtrails as it's a much stronger album and didn't deserve to get the muted reaction it did. Nice to see your positive reactions to it.

The only review I’ve looked up is Pitchfork’s; and it’s a solid, generous Sodomsky piece, but it doesn’t really reckon with or grasp the sheer quality of the album (IMO)…

Yeah “Dealer” is very odd vocally coming from her.