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

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.

I kind of like it, she sounds more “50’s” if it makes any sense.

Sounds like Horace Andy.

What! you’re right! The verses sounds like Horace Andy. Is her voice pitched down in there? It really doesn’t sound like her. I can hear some multitracking but no idea if there’s a second vocalist credited or it’s all her.

I had to scan the credits last year to ensure it wasn't him.

The song features vocals from Miles Kane, frontman of The Last Shadow Puppets.

thanks to this thread i've revisited Blue Banisters for the first time since it came out and WOW every song is hitting me hard. it's not that i disliked it when it came out, it just didn't *seem* to make much of an impression. i guess they just needed to live in my subconscious for over a year to finally sink in

Dealer is from a scrapped album with Kane.

I checked out Kane’s 2017 album Coup de Grace, which has a Lana co-write (“Loaded”) which apparently came out of the same sessions as “Dealer.” The album definitely does not sound like “Dealer”!

So is that actually Miles Kane on the verses? You can hear the opening vocal - the one that sounds like Horace Andy which I’m not sure is LDR anymore - and LDR’s vocal entering on the second verse.

I mean, she sings on it too, yeah...

So where I’m at is that is that it’s actually Miles Kane on verses and LDR enters on “give you all my money” onwards.

yes it's a duet

After much listening and re-listening, I've made a playlist of my fave (pre-Banisters) Lana Keepers (sorry, Ultraviolence fans... it's not represented).

Her career has such an "upward arc"; I can't think of another modern artist with a catalog like that. Feels more like the way artists would develop back in the '60s or '70s(?) – lots of albums, and increasingly finding their footing after a shaky first few tries. (I think "Terence Loves You" is her first really great song.)

I’ve made the same argument with certain Lana naysayers for sure. I was head-over-heels for “Video Games” and then extremely disappointed with the SNL appearance and the overall ‘thing’ with the following singles. But: an incendiary performance at Coachella in 2014, songs getting better and better, she’s now one of my favorite contemporary artists, for sure

I asked a coworker, with sometimes overlapping taste, if she's an LDR fan, and she said – "I've never forgiven her for that SNL performance"(!) (I went back and watched it, and yeah, it was mighty stiff, but... guess it's just as well I wasn't paying attention back then, the LDR "discourse" seems like it was sure gnarly.)

I think the reaction to the SNL appearance was so harsh because people were essentially trying to figure out what her deal was immediately after "Video Games." There was skeptical press about how she had changed her name and image, and also the debate about how the lyrical content wasn't exactly feminist-leaning. So when she bombed on SNL the people who hadn't heard of her until then were like "what the fuck is this," and many of the people who had heard of her thought, "I guess she stinks after all," and they were done with her.

Chemtrails has grown on me... it's def an album you can listen to all the through (despite some weaker tracks on the 2nd half). The playing is really strong – the music has this kind of languid but focused quality; with horns hovering softly in the background, and piano swelling up and receding, following its own train of thought. (It looks like Antonoff did a lot of the playing, in addition to (co-)producing, which makes me see him in a new light... I didn't realize that sounds like this were in his toolbox.)

3. Her choices of cover songs seem really bad to me!

...amending this to note that her take on "Season of the Witch" (from a 2019 horror-movie soundtrack) is pretty groovy!

i really love NFR ... i'm ambivalent at best to essentially the rest of her music ("white dress" is also great)

but this thread makes me feel like i should listen to blue bannisters