On Chemtrails, Del Rey regularly sticks to her top register, giving her voice a whispering and fragile kewpiepop quality. Where her softest voice still sounded rich and structured Norman Fucking Rockwell!, the Del Rey of Chemtrails sounds weaker and shallower. That voice fades a little too easily in the background and you can hear the Auto-Tune a little too often. (That Auto-Tune is a deliberate aesthetic choice, not an attempt to disguise anemic vocal performances, but that does not mean that it is the right deliberate aesthetic choice.) More importantly, songwriting is generally not as muscular as it was two years ago. Norman Fucking Rockwell! was a album. Chemtrails about the outdoor club feels more like a collection of vibes.
For Lana Del Rey, this is not new. Chemtrails is Del Rey’s sixth album in a decade, and it fits Honeymoon and Lust for life, the records where Del Rey is content to indulge in her own sloppy splendor. Like those albums, Chemtrails is a pleasant enough sunny afternoon version – the kind of album that at the same time manages to be beautiful and boring. A few songs, such as the early single “Let Me Love You Like A Woman”, capture the gentle majesty of Del Rey’s best work. A few adaptations, such as the hippie funk of the second half of “Dance Till We Die,” find subtle new wrinkles on Del Rey’s long-established home style. But most of the time Chemtrails blink quietly in the background. This is a pretty good recording of moody torch songs from an artist who can do so much more.
The Lana Del Rey of Chemtrails about the outdoor club has still burst, but her lyrics have taken a different form. None of the lyrics on Chemtrails burns as just as ‘your poetry is bad and you blame the news’, but that’s not what she’s going for here. Instead, to Chemtrails, Del Rey uses her love for the mythical Americana that inspired basically all of her recorded music. The title of the album feels like a classic bait-and-link doomed beauty – the place of idyllic paid match, poisoned by the imaginary mental agents who came to represent so many in front of so many deeply lost people. But from the lyrics of the album, it’s clear that Del Rey is much more interested in the country club than in the chemtrails. And she like the outdoor club. She thinks it’s a fun place.
On the title track, Del Rey sings about the country club as an idealized oasis of domestic happiness: “It’s nice how this deep normalcy is going to lie over me / I’m not bored or unhappy, I’m still so weird and wild.” She is in her jewelery in the pool, chasing her little red sports car and thinking God. On ‘Let Me Love You Like A Woman’ she bathes in the warmth of tradition and submission. She is from a small town; she only mentions it because she’s ready to leave LA and she wants you to come. More than once she sings that she no longer wants to be a candle in the wind. The whole album works as a hymn to some mythical idea of stability. It does not seem like an ironic start. It seems to be a sincere longing for a state of being that may not exist.
The album also serves as a praise song on American music from bygone eras. On ‘Breaking Up Slowly’, Del Rey and Nikki Lane, the Americana singer who co-wrote the song, evoke the thoughts of George Jones and Tammy Wynette and use them both as a totem and a warning. Lane does not want to end up like Tammy Wynette because Del Rey warns that “George was arrested on the lawn.” Del Rey even lets a little false compulsion creep into her voice. (She can not deceive me; I’ve been to Lake Placid before. Mothers in Lake Placid speak as if they were Canadian.)
On ‘Dance Till We Die’, Del Rey mentions the singers and songwriters she got to know. She sounds a bit like the Game that Eazy-E constantly mentions: ‘I cover Joni and I dance with Joan / Stevie dialing the phone. On the opener ‘White Dress’ she applies the most idealized nostalgia to the rock revival in the early ’00s: ‘Listen to Kings Of Leon on the beat’, ‘Listen to the White Stripes when they were white hot.’ She might as well talk about the Beach Boys again.
Two years ago, Lana Del Rey made an album that could be associated with just about any of the idols whose names she sings so lovingly. Chemtrails about the outdoor club is not it. Instead, Chemtrails is a small, muted, pretty little picture. The album culminates as it ends, when Del Rey really covers for Joni. Del Rey and guests Zella Day and Weyes Blood sing ‘For Free’, the 1970 song where Joni Mitchell marvels at the beauty of a guy playing clarinet on a street corner while buying jewelry. The three sang this one on stage in 2019, when Del Rey toured afterwards Norman Fucking Rockwell!, and the video on which they practice provided a sweet, momentary, unimportant internet moment. In its true recorded form, the trio’s “For Free” works in the same way. I hope the rumble does not drown it.
Chemtrails about the outdoor club is now out on Polydor / Interscope.