You can not fire Lana Del Rey; she stops.
Months after numerous attempts at cancellations – here she centered her white privilege; here she was wearing a gauze face mask in the middle of a pandemic; here she insisted she was obviously not racist because she had rappers for boyfriends – the most glamorous pop music headliner is back with a haunting new album about leaving the spotlight to find a simpler place where the haters can not subdue her.
Again and again on ‘Chemtrails Over the Country Club’, which slipped away on Thursday night, Del Rey sings that she rejected her name as if it were a heavy coat. She dreams of leaving Los Angeles, the adopted home that is so prominent on 2019’s “Norman F – Rockwell!” For “a little piece of heaven” came out in Arkansas or Nebraska. She describes the washing and washing of her hair with the kind of breathtaking sensuality she used while singing to get high on the beach.
In the MP’s piano ballad opener, “White Dress”, the 35-year-old even looks back with love on her pre-star days as a struggling waitress: ‘I was not famous, just listened to Kings of Leon , ‘she said. singing – a strange moving indication of how eager she is to get out from under the microscope.
Del Rey’s unfolding PR crisis, which began in May with an Instagram post about how she was treated differently from other female pop stars – most of those she mentioned, including Beyoncé and Nicki Minaj, were colored – the turbulent reception of ‘Norman’ followed. F— Rockwell !, ”which received the best reviews of 2019 and a Grammy nomination for the album of the year, and paved the way for the publication of a true collection of poems by the singer.
The whiplash was therefore undoubtedly severe. Yet it is unclear how attentively Del Rey follows her perception, or at least how seriously she takes it all. In interviews, she talks about a happy basic life off stage; she says she likes to go to Starbucks and brunch with her friends – not exactly an image that is in line with the themes of glamor and danger that run through her music.
It is therefore possible that the striking Midwestern settings on ‘Chemtrails’ are merely the product of the search for COVID-free spaces or her recent relationship with Sean ‘Sticks’ Larkin, an officer at the Tulsa Police Department in New York. The Times said he and Del Rey “went to Target” and “had a Super Bowl party” with his “law enforcement friends and their wives.” (The couple have since split up; Del Rey is said to be engaged to Claeston Johnson, a Modesto singer.)
It’s the tricky thing to analyze Del Rey’s records. Ever since she came up with ‘Video Games’ a decade ago – an instant classic meditation on modern celebrities that has touched on countless debates about her artistic authenticity – the singer has alternately looked like the the most and the least media-savvy musician in pop.
Over the past year, more than once, as she ignites her accumulated benevolence, you might wonder if she really knows what she’s doing – that her surprising movements may have been part of a larger creative project about the sick American soul in the age of Donald Trump (for whom she casually appeared in a radio chat to relinquish his complicity in the Capitol riot in January).
What is undeniable is that she has become one of the best songwriters of her generation, with a lyrical and melodic flair that encourages an emotional investment in her music, above all that reflects it in her real life. On “Chemtrails” her singing also reaches a new high; she has never inspired as much empathy as she moves between her airy head voice and her sultry chest voice in these brightly detailed songs about escape and loss and memory.
Again, I work with Jack Antonoff, who produced ‘Norman F – Rockwell!’ Del Rey invites comparisons to Taylor Swift’s double approach on ‘Folkore’ and ‘Evermore’ in 2020 (where Antonoff also had a hand in): Where each of the singer’s previous records recorded a distinctly sonic character – from the trip-hop of 2012’s “Born to Die” to the garage rock of 2014’s “Ultraviolence” to the slow-mo torch songs of 2015 “Honeymoon” – this one stays right in the soft psych-folk zone she and Antonoff for his predecessor invented.
But if the sound is familiar – think of the very sweet place triangulated by Sandy Denny, kd long and the self-titled third album of Velvet Underground – the scenarios can still flatten you, as in the beautiful “Wanderlust”, about someone defending her impulse. to take the road, and “Wild at Heart,” in which Del Rey draws a line between generations of ruthlessly investigated women from Princess Diana to Kim Kardashian:
I left Calabasas, escaped from all the ashes and ran into the darkness
And it made me wild at heart
The cameras have flashes, this causes the car crashes, but I’m not a star
If you love me, you love me, for I’m wild at heart
“Breaking Up Slowly” is a rooted duet with Nikki Lane, an alt-country-up-and-comer, who rhymes ‘life of regret’ with ‘Tammy Wynette;’ “Yosemite” puts more thoughts about the old days over a ghostly acoustic groove. In ‘Dance Til We Die’, which begins as a vague lament, before suddenly bursting into a funky ’70s rock prop, Del Rey further populates the generation she introduces in ‘Wild at Heart’ with exclamations Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Stevie Nicks and Courtney Love (who ‘almost burned down my house’, according to Del Rey’s recollection of an LA night you had to be there).
Then she concludes the album with a beautiful rendition of Mitchell’s “For Free,” which she shares, as she lived in the Hollywood Bowl a year and a half ago, with two of her contemporary ladies of the gorge: Zella Day and Weyes Blood.
“Me, I’m playing for luck and those velvet curtain calls,” Del Rey sings, comparing herself a little shyly to a street musician doing nothing.
Forgiveness for which she can ask; her need for attention may be harder to shake.