The showiest display of her vocals, by far, is on opener “White Dress,” where Del Rey upends autobiographical lyrics about her prefame life by singing in her highest possible register, a self-effacing parody of female fragility. Her tone stays measured and careful: “I only mention it ‘cause.…” she murmurs, in two separate songs, like she’s just said something too revealing to an acquaintance. These songs are quiet musings, the kind you’d play on a baby grand in an empty ballroom.ĭel Rey’s voice, that distinctly mid-century drawl, often fades in and out of the album’s instrumentation. (As with the previous album, longtime collaborator Rick Nowels steps in for one collaboration, the haunting folk track “Yosemite.”) Percussion takes the form of soft bongo drums, live drum cymbals, and barely pulsing synths that are nearly dissolved in the ether. Chemtrails makes her case more plainly: This is Del Rey’s most delicate-sounding album to date, supported by Jack Antonoff’s production taking the Seventies singer-songwriter sheen of NFR and stripping it to its most essential piano-and-guitar elements. In her infamous “Question for the Culture” open letter that she released last spring, her point that she was making space for “women who look and act like me … the kind of women who are slated mercilessly for being their authentic, delicate selves,” got lost in the backlash she received for appearing to pit herself against Doja Cat, Beyoncé, and other pop stars of color. The mundaneness feeds into Chemtrails’ depiction of American whiteness and white womanhood in particular, a long-running fascination in Del Rey’s work that has been called into question recently with her public controversies. Kids dance the Louisiana two-step in a forgotten bar a prolonged breakup meets its bitter end people get high and make out in a parking lot while “the whole world is crazy.” It’s an incredibly bleak yet weirdly comforting sentiment all at once – the notion that one’s personal dramas, the ups and downs of “normal” life, will continue to go on even as the rest of the world goes to shit. Her observations are somber now, her melancholy placed against a more substantial backdrop. Even her saddest songs got a dance remix. But back then, Lana took the Shangri-Las approach, recalling motorcycle crashes and illicit affairs on the beach with a winking, cooing innocence. Sure, there was always danger lurking behind the Kennedy smiles and gray mansion luncheons featured on Born to Die and her other early works it’s a trait that this album’s laughably conspiratorial title still carries. Though Del Rey’s overall project has remained remarkably consistent throughout her career, her growing disillusionment with fame, and with this country’s prevailing iconography of wealth and success, has loomed large as the national mood has grown more dire. 'Silence of the Lambs': The Complete Buffalo Bill Story After all, when that fireball hurtles past Hawaii towards the West Coast, as Lana foresaw on NFR ’s “The Greatest,” who’s going to be there to sing torch ballads over the silent, ashen remains of Los Angeles? Lana Del Rey, of course.
On Chemtrails, her most subdued and introspective album thus far, she soundtracks the death of the American dream right from the heart of Hollywood, just as she did on her previous effort, 2019’s electrifying Norman Fucking Rockwell! And while it may not have as many grandiose showpieces as its older sibling – no nine-minute “Venice Bitch” to be found here – Chemtrails is every bit as sharp and prescient of a cultural artifact from pop’s premier Cassandra.
But thankfully – for us, at least – she never acts on her wishes. “Eighty miles north or south will do.” It’s an escapist fantasy the pop singer has entertained before: stealing away from the City of Angels in a pickup truck that no one recognizes. “I’m ready to leave L.A., and I want you to come,” Lana Del Rey sings on her latest album Chemtrails Over the Country Club.
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