Lana Del Rey – ‘Chemtrails Over The Country Club’
Tumblr’s IT Girl offers up a slice of Western-enthused pie on her seventh studio album.
Photo: Interscope Records
Put simply, Lana Del Rey is a storm. She entered the music scene with her lightning strike of an album Born to Die, followed up with further sparks such as Paradise and Ultraviolence.
But, in recent years, her music has become the calm after the storm, easing into a deep, thundering and melancholic sound that somehow still has the ability to remain impactful. Despite her controversy—in which she had only dug herself deeper into in 2020— it’s hard to deny her ability to make good music. Chemtrails Over the Country Club is a defining example of this.
However, it doesn’t get off to a promising start. White Dress, the opening track, begins with the gloriously beautiful piano that has, and will quite possibly always continue, to appear in Lana’s sound. Yet she trials a new voice; raspy and almost a whisper—which is jarring to the listener, almost as if an advertisement for her poetry book Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass.
The titular track comes swiftly afterwards to set the tone for the entirety of the album, and it may be one of Lana’s best songs yet. While it reflects her recent style of a slow-building, hypnotic melody, her voice shines through particularly strong in this song.
In true Del Rey fashion, she sings of luxuries like jewels and sports cars, yet her voice has become close-to ethereal in contrast. She ends each verse with a voice like that of a siren call, and nowhere is that more apparent than the moment she sings, “It's beautiful, how this deep normality settles down over me / I'm not bored or unhappy / I'm still so strange and wild / I'm in the wind, I'm in the water / Nobody's son, nobody's daughter”.
As Chemtrails slowly fades to a single drum beat, we’re transported from the glistening pools and oceans of Los Angeles to the Midwestern deserts of Arizona and Nevada. Her voice is cleverly layered throughout many of her songs, such as Tulsa Jesus Freak and Yosemite, to create a mesmerising and simply bewitching sound. She appears to use this to build intensity to her songs as if you’re hearing the sounds of witches chanting deep in the Sonoran desert; a shining example of Lana’s new, thunderous style.
No song better draws the imagery of the Western American deserts than It’s Dark But Just a Game, arguably one of the strongest tracks from the album. Between the laidback guitar that plays as Lana sings, and the drumming combined with the charm of the tambourine, she paints the picture of an outlaw driving along Route 66 in the sizzling heat. Her chorus provides a slightly sweeter melody, yet the sudden return of the drums brings the listener straight back to this imagery. As you listen, you can’t help but feel it would fit perfectly as the main title to films such as True Romance or Bonny and Clyde.
This sound settles for Not All Who Wander Are Lost and Yosemite but it returns with a vengeance for Breaking Up Slowly; a track that features Nikki Lane, whose rough, western sound and often-petulant style is right at home alongside Lana’s notable style. While Lana only has one solo verse on this song, it’s lyrical simplicity is surprisingly impactful and alluringly revealing: “George got arrested out on the lawn / We might be breakin’ up after this song / Will he still love me long after I'm gone? / Or did he see it comin’ all along?”
Photo: Mat Hayward for Getty Images
It reads like a modern romantic tragedy as if watching a relationship burst into flames and seeing it burn right in front of your eyes. This isn’t new from the Queen-of-2014-Tumblr, but it feels as if she’s gifting a piece of herself to her fans this time around.
Perhaps there is so much pain in this song in particular as Lana clearly expresses hints of a breakup of some kind. Like many artists in recent years, it appears her love affair with California is over. Instead, she moves on to a new love for the Midwest. This album is both a break-up letter to her former love, alongside a love letter to her new love. As Lana states in the track Wild at Heart: “I left Calabasas, escaped all the ashes, ran into the dark / And it made me wild, wild, wild at heart”.
Even though she didn’t take notes from Taylor Swift and publicly denote her ‘past eras’, it’s evident with her seventh studio album that she has paved the way for a new era in her life; one she will be continuing to grow in the summer.
She announced yesterday the title of her eighth album—Rock Candy Sweet—which is set for proposed release on June 1st 2021.
It’s safe to say 2021 is set to be a good year for music, and an even better year for fans of Lana Del Rey.
