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

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

It is a lowkey masterpiece (…if I haven’t adequately made that point!)

The melodies set against that monochromatic production wore me down, especially against two albums. No doubt I could assemble a playlist comprising the good stuff. I loved NFR too.

I think I’ve recommended BB to five (5) ppl IRL so far…

I definitely went through that thing with Blue Bannisters where I listened once or twice when it came out, decided it was more of the same, and then 6-8 months later put it on while driving around and was blown away. I think it's very likely her best or at least should be a big part of that conversation.

New song is out

Someone please set her piano on fire

Holy sh!t... this album is gonna be amazing

How did she just like casually decide, in mid-2021, to become the world's greatest artist(?)

(I'm hyperbolizing obv - but goddamn, these new tracks)

yes to this song, album shaping up beautifuly.

s-s-springtime madness

https://www.themodernhouse.com/sales-list/evelyn-road/

I feel like the Violet Bent Backwards over the Grass poetry album/book, while not all that notable in itself, might have really loosened her ideas about sound and words on these two albums. "Wildflower Wildfire" is hypnotic in its layering of vocal and instrumental textures.

“Dark But Just a Game,” a Del Rey/Antonoff tune on Chemtrails, reminds me a little of “Death by a Thousand Cuts" (the Swift/Antonoff joint). It’s one of the few instances where I can maybe hear the Antonoff in the songwriting, on one he co-wrote.

what am I missing about that house listing?

I assumed it was posted in the wrong thread (or it’s an inside reference I’m not cool enough to get)

The stack of LPs under the table.

Good spot. Was hoping it would have blue banisters.

The turntable isn't hooked up to anything and some of those covers have water damage or something. Who could live in such a dump?!?

Good spot. Was hoping it would have blue banisters.

They’re now green and grey.

I somehow completely missed Blue Bannisters – the title track is incredible.

I’ve been digging into A&W, which begins as somewhat standard LDR ballad before going completely sideways 2/3 of the way through into some weird electronic nursery rhyme breakdown chant about drugs and sex (worth noting for audiophiles, this has a really terrific surround Dolby Atmos mix). So ... still kind of a standard LDR tune, all things considered.

This is kind of my LDR experience these days – new single or album pops up in my feed, I check out some of it, am usually really impressed by a track or two, rinse, repeat. I’m not sure I’ve dug into a whole record of hers since Lust for Life – about half of which I loved and the other half mostly just strutted on past.

I think this is kind of what happens when you emerge onto the scene a fully formed artist. Everyone wants to work with you and you’re game – so you go from being rough n’ ready where some stuff soars and others crash and burn to where the overall quality improves but the highs are maybe less risky and weird and the whole thing, in her case, is buried in a sea of strings, piano and tape echo.

At this point, she’s done so many production, genre and formal experiments that it usually takes a really killer melody for any of it to stick. Thankfully, she still has those. In general, since the rules haven't really applied to her since Born To Die—let’s put a clompy hip hop beat here, let’s make this song 7 minutes long and make it a duet—I find she benefits from when she abides by a few anyway.

Has anyone listened to her very first album – the one that was pulled from iTunes when Born to Die came out? Despite its non-availability (except on YouTube), she seems to count it as a core part of her catalog; a promotional T-shirt for Ocean Blvd refers to the new one as "the ninth studio album by Lana Del Rey" (all Tarantino style).

^^I figured out how to listen to "LDR1" on the big speaker, via YT Music. It's pretty good! Better than Born to Die...

(The highlight – besides "Yayo," which later made it onto the Paradise EP – is "Brite Lites," which is v proto–Billie Eilish.)

It's kind of fascinating how she went from her first album – a batch of nimble and fresh-feeling songs, all written solely by her – to an overdetermined and (IMO) pretty corny major-label debut, which feels weighted down with a lot of "input." Maybe she got what she wanted with it, I dunno...

(I wonder if it's a coincidence that "Video Games" includes the line "Heaven is a place on Earth with you" – even though that's not one of the songs co-written by Rick Nowels, the Belinda Carlisle songwriter.)

I happened across this (highly interesting/recommended) recent interview in Rolling Stone (UK), that actually addresses a few of the questions I raised above – what went sideways with BTD (in her opinion); but also my half-joking thing about what suddenly shifted for her in 2021. Turns out, a few things did...

(I like this a lot – it’s very generous):

“If people think my music is good it’s because there’s other people involved in the songs and in the process of making it. So many people,” she says, with a smile at just how good it is.

last track on the new one is an early version of "venice bitch" apparently, huh

And the album is 77 minutes long, which is...too much.

Looks like there are a few (spoken-word?) "interludes," which may be eventual skips (bringing down the functional runtime)?

I cannot wait for it to come out!