Lana Del Rey’s latest album begins with the borderline infamous singer-songwriter reminiscent of a time before fame. White Dress, sung in a fluttering soprano at the end of her series, depicts 19-year-old Del Rey in a tight uniform and works as a waitress in the mid-00s, dreaming of what is to come. “Down at the Men in Music Business Conference,” she trusts in a breathless rush, the budding artist finally feels “seen.”
On the other side of the album is a cover of Joni Mitchell’s For Free, in which the grande dame of the song reflected in 1970 on how a busker can play ‘real good, for free’ to so little praise, while Mitchell self inhark. as a well-known. Del Rey’s album has more than one bow, but one is a number game. On a white dress she is alone; Towards the end, she is joined by Weyes Blood and singer-songwriter Zella Day, who each sing a Joni verse and attend the perfect harmonies, weighing up the contradictions.
During this excellent seventh outing, Del Rey regularly chews on the troubled issues of success, her loneliness, and her camaraderie. She takes you to different pubs, and tells her not only her zodiac sign – Cancer – but her moon: Leo. In the middle is perhaps the biggest segment of this amazing album. A full song with a small key that does not try to make the effort, but Yosemite dates from sessions for Del Rey’s album 2017 Lust for life, but symbolizes this album’s concern about craftsmanship. “We did it for fun, we did it for free,” she sings of her work, in one of Del Rey’s best songs to date. On Wild at Heart, she claims she’s not a star and nods at the death of Princess Diana – ‘the cameras had flashes, it caused the car crashes’ – an impression only reinforced by repeated references to Elton John’s Candle in the Wind.
Fame is just one concern: Del Rey weighs the relative merits of change and steadfastness, of love and loneliness, all with intensely discrete instrumentation by returning producer Jack Antonoff, who worked on Del Rey’s latest album, The Equally Extraordinary Norman Fucking Rockwell!. All of these nods are carefully sown through a series of songs that also refer to each other.
The title of the album – Chemtrails about the outdoor club – could be used on many of Del Rey’s previous records, pointing to the contrast between the Americana of white picket fences and the country’s uncomfortable dark side, a constant fascination with Lana Del Rey’s work. (“Chemtrails” refers to a conspiracy theory that the condensation of aircraft was secretly fed with ominous chemicals.)
But it’s a record full of beauty and thoughtful autobiography that only a more experienced, more confident songwriter could have made. Although one of his central songs, Dark But Just a Game, lives on the prettier side of Los Angeles’ fame, it seems like the dead eyes of Del Rey’s former protagonists are behind her, replaced by something less clever and more direct. These are tunes full of sad vulnerability and irreconcilable beauty, studded with Laurel Canyon setbacks and elegant, multiple singing. Del Rey came close to conventionality – but on her own terms. She will still get ‘lots of pink champagne’ (a form of MDMA), a barfly that is equally at home in Calabasas – a famous enclave in the hills of LA – or a ‘Tulsa Jesus freak’ in bed. lok.
Love songs still dominate in the work of this profound romantic, but throughout ChemtrailsDel Rey repeatedly on the mentorship and solidarity of fellow female songwriters. As well as Weyes Blood and Day, singer-songwriter Nikki Lane dives with Del Rey on a board-like country tune, Breaking Up Slowly (apparently more country songs are waiting in the wings). The track evokes long-suffering country singer Tammy Wynette and concludes that, where once the protagonist of Del Rey might have clung, ‘the split’ was the right thing to do ‘. In addition, Del Rey also covers Joni and dances with Joan [Baez]While Stevie [Nicks] is ‘telephone call’. In the album’s cover art, Del Rey is surrounded by her sister and a multitude of female friends, all glamorous and, very clearly, with many skin tones. (Del Rey came under fire for indiscriminate comments online about the production of colored women, which she said were misunderstood.)
Del Rey no longer sells a kind of compromised ultra-femininity; she does “the Louisiana duel, high and bright” with her group. In the video for the title track, her suit turns into sexy werewolves at night, perhaps referring to Clarissa Pinkola Estés’s Women running together the wolves and the recent Disney + Marvel offering WandaVision as much as The Wizard van Oz. Del Rey struggles to clear up something very important: “I’m not dissatisfied or unhappy,” she sings, “I’m still so weird and wild.”