“I’m ready to leave LA, and I want you to come,” sang Lana Del Rey on her latest album Chemtrails about the outdoor club. “Eighty miles north or south will do it.” It’s an escapist fantasy that the pop singer has entertained before: stealing from the City of Angels in a bakkie which no one recognizes. But fortunately – at least for us – she never acts according to her wishes. On Chemtrails, her most restrained and introspective album to date, she sounds the death of the American dream right from the heart of Hollywood, just like with her previous attempt, 2019’s electrifying Norman Fucking Rockwell! And while it may not have as many grandiose showpieces as its older sibling, there is not a nine-minute Venice bitch here – Chemtrails is just as sharp and predictable from a cultural artifact of Cassandra’s prime minister. After all, when that fireball jerked past Hawaii to the West Coast, as Lana foresaw NFR“The Greatest,” who’s going to be there to sing torchbearers about the quiet, icy remnants of Los Angeles? Lana Del Rey, of course. Where would she be otherwise?
Although Del Rey’s overall project remained remarkably consistent throughout her career, her increasing disillusionment with fame and with the country’s prevailing iconography of wealth and success grew as the national mood became more precarious. Of course, there is always danger behind the Kennedy smiles and gray mansion meals Born to die and her other early works; it’s a feature that still carries this album’s ridiculous conspiracy title. But then Lana took the Shangri-Las approach, reminiscent of motorcycle accidents and illegal affairs on the beach with a wink, screaming innocence. Even her saddest songs got a dance remix. Not so much anymore. Her observations are now gloomy, her melancholy set against a more substantial background. Children dance the Louisiana two-step in a forgotten bar; a prolonged break has its bitter end; people get high and make in a parking lot ‘while the whole world is crazy’. At the same time, it’s an incredibly gloomy, yet strangely comforting sentiment – the idea that one’s personal dramas, the ups and downs of ‘normal’ life, will continue, even if the rest of the world goes shit.
The everyday feeds in Chemtrails’ especially the depiction of American whiteness and being a white woman, a long-standing fascination in Del Rey’s work that has recently been called into question by her public controversies. In her infamous “Question for the culture” open letter she made last spring, and her point that she was making way for ‘women who look and act like me … the kind of women who ruthlessly intend to be their authentic, fine selves’ got lost in the setback she received for It seems she is speaking out against Doja Cat, Beyoncé and other pop stars of color. Chemtrails makes her case clearer: this is Del Rey’s finest sound to date, backed by Jack Antonoff’s production that makes the Seventies singer-songwriter shine NFR and stripped it to its most important piano-and-guitar elements. (As with the previous album, longtime collaborator Rick Nowels joins forces for one collaboration, the haunting folk track “Yosemite.”) Percussion takes the form of soft bongo drums, live drum cymbals and barely pulsating synths that almost dissolve in the ether . . These songs are silent thoughts, the kind you would play on a small baby in an empty ballroom.
Del Rey’s voice, clearly drawn from the middle of the century, often disappears into and out of the album’s instrumentation. Her tone remains measured and careful: “I only mention it because …” she murmurs in two separate songs, as if she had just said something too revealing for an acquaintance. The most striking performance of her singing is by far on the opener ‘White Dress’, where Del Rey raises autobiographical lyrics about her life by singing in her highest possible register, a self-deprecating parody of female fragility. ‘Down in Orlando I was only 19 / Down at the Men in Music business conference, ”she squeaks, the words tumbling out. (This is also an excellent example of Del Rey’s ability to eradicate dry humor from mythology – it is unlikely that such a business conference will ever exist, emphasizing the respective achievements of men in the music industry.)
In contrast, a strong stream of idyllic female solidarity is flowing Chemtrails‘ennui. “God, it feels good not to be alone,” Del Rey sighed over “Dance Till We Die,” her ladies-from-the-gorge responds to Le Tigre’s “Popular topic” where she tells dance with Joan Baez and extinguishing a home with Courtney Love. She draws a line between herself and Tammy Wynette’s tragic submissiveness on ‘Breaking Up Slowly’, aided by Nikki Lane, an illegal girl, and pays tribute to Mother Joni again with a faithful rendition of ‘For Free’ and closes the album of. with impeccable harmonies by Zella Day and Weyes Blood. For all of Del Rey’s bad defense regarding how many women of color were portrayed in her debut friends on the cover of the album, it emphasized her belief that such a scene could be both feasible and uncomplicated.
Del Rey’s dreams of places outside the San Gabriel Mountains take her to more states than she has combined in all her other albums: Florida, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Arkansas (pronounced ar-KAN-sas), Louisiana, the foreign land of Northern California. God and religion also play an extraordinary role, ranging from the deity of Sun Ra to a Bible tattoo to the ‘Tulsa Jesus Freak’ who as a singer’s most recent muse. Del Rey has always been passionate about repeating nouns – designer brands, classic rock songs, and so on – and it would be easy to dismiss these new additions as merely Del Rey’s way of acknowledging the most recent political climate. But it also reflects a personal evolution for Del Rey, as her outward personality of the past five years has gradually moved away from her initial, defiant “Lolita lost in the hood” aesthetic. a woman with more suburban experience, a person who is regularly bullied by her fans for possessing a “live, laugh, love” decor and a painting of a sailboat above her fireplace.
Whether this era of Lana dress for Lana is just another character or truly her ‘authentic, delicate self’ will undoubtedly come up, but it is telling that most desire on Chemtrails everything revolves around stability; the woman who once remarked, ‘Kanye West is blond and gone,’ now fears the irreversible damage that fame can do to a psyche more than anything else. “The best have lost their heads / so I will not change / I will stay the same”, she promises in ‘Dark but Just a Game’. She speaks to a steadfast lover of ‘Yosemite’, ‘Seasons can change / but we do not change.’ With a career-wide ability to freeze historical icons of culture with a single lyric or video, she now sees if magic can work on itself.
For a brief moment, it is so. The rising ‘Wild at Heart’, the highlight of the album and one of Del Rey’s most poetic efforts to date, is a study to do with what you already have: the song regains its most prominent elements from several tracks that on Norman Fucking Rockwell! On the verses, Del Rey drifts on to a tune derived from “Love Song” and “Hope Is a Dangerous Thing”; she smokes cigarettes “to understand the smog” positively romantic. Suddenly the music swells into a refrain straight from “How to Disappear” – the NFR cut that is best related to Chemtrails in spirit. In that song, Del Rey saw her grow old in the California sunshine with a child and two cats in the garden. ‘Here we find the opposite: Del Rey flees Calabasas in the dead of night, leaving LA’s fiery hell in her wake. As if editing a movie montage, her mind flashes after the paparazzi car accident that killed Princess Diana. But in the next measure, she will reassure herself again: “I am not a star.” Here, if it is nowhere else, she is free to be observed.