Chemtrails Over the Country Club

The production by Jack Antonoff is stunning, with a huge amount happening beneath the surface of what first manifests as a scratchily intimate acoustic-flavoured unplugged band. There is not a weak song or throwaway performance here, amidst many that only reveal their secrets on repeated listening.

A great storyteller, Del Rey consistently delivers the who, what, where and when. She picks out the telling details – turquoise jewellery, the TV in the corner, “on the second floor, baby”. She sketches a backstory (“I come from a small town”) and then tells you how it all feels.

It’s a reminder that, more than just being influenced by the likes of Joan Baez and Stevie Nicks, she’s now on a par with them. Lana Del Rey is at the peak of her game – just don’t expect her to come down anytime soon.

An enchanting listen, her world-building remains absolutely undimmed on this triumphant, bewitching project.

The album’s strongest songs follow — the title track and “Wild at Heart” may have the best melodies, “Tulsa Jesus Freak” serves up her familiar white-trash-fabulous theme — but at around the midway mark it starts getting even more languid, like the wine or the meds are kicking in and… mmm… can’t we just sit here on the couch for a while longer? (To be fair, it may be the pandemic kicking in.) However, the slow tempos don’t detract from her always-vivid lyrics.

Chemtrails over the Country Club is a gorgeous listen: charming, clever, and vulnerable. Del Rey is as effective as ever in painting American fantasies, evoking nostalgia for realities always out of reach.

It’s hard to resist the sensory impact of these songs. Chemtrails picks up the nostalgic thread of 2019’s Norman Fucking Rockwell!, though here she’s mostly Midwest and more melodic. [Jun 2021, p.25]

At best, Del Rey’s hyper-referential music convincingly recreates the particular feeling of encountering art in a postmodern age, when the past is so cluttered with worthwhile cultural artifacts that everything new reminds one, at least a little bit, of something old. But as she dances on that fine line between evoking and signifying, Del Rey sometimes risks outsourcing her profundity to things other artists have said more vividly before. Such is the gamble of ending an album with a Joni Mitchell cover — though here that’s a risk Del Rey pulls off.

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.

This is a record chockful of beauty and thoughtful autobiography that only a more experienced, more assured songwriter could have made.

Whilst it isn’t the universal smash hit that Norman F**king Rockwell instantly was, you get the feeling that Chemtrails Over the Country Club is a slow burner, whose flame will ignite the next chapter of Del Rey’s career and all the many splendid opportunities that brings with it.

With Chemtrails Over the Country Club, Del Rey shows her softest moments can be her most powerful.

As the album progresses, a powerful expansion of Del Rey's folkier inclinations. [Apr 2021, p.80]

Chemtrails leans further into the sounds of sunny, ‘70s California - summoning Judee Sill and Karen Dalton - and it’s watertight too: her first 45 minute album since her debut. Sonically, things sound gorgeous.

Chemtrails Over the Country Club is a record full of euphoric highs and baffling lows. It’s an enjoyable listen that cinematically celebrates Del Rey’s vocal prowess.

Chemtrails is less a full transformation than the first step forward in another direction.

Lana Del Rey’s sixth album dials back the grandiosity in favor of smaller, more intimate moments. It carries a roaming spirit of folk and Americana without losing the romantic melodrama of her best work.

[Closing track] aside, most of the 11 songs on Chemtrails are melodically and vocally substantive, replete with sensual hooks and evocative images.

Chemtrails over the Country Club is sultry at times, syrupy sweet at others, and sad in a truer way than we have yet seen from Lana. It is a well-woven escape, but it is harder than ever not to wonder: at what cost?

Chemtrails feels somewhat unmoored. It’s the quietest, most delicate music of Del Rey’s career so far, comprising several gorgeous arrangements, but very little of it feels particularly magnetic, especially when stacked against the rest of her songbook. The lyricism is, at moments, uninspired.

For better or worse, Chemtrails Over The Country Club is 100% a Lana Del Rey record that fits quaintly into her discography. Anyone following her up to this point shouldn’t bat an eye at how sharp of a left turn this is compared to her previous album. She’s absurdly contrived, but the allure is far too captivating to look away.

Though Chemtrails isn’t quite Lana’s strongest album (that’s still Norman) nor is it the most iconically Lana (that’ll always be Ultraviolence), it’s an intimate, emotional, and largely successful renewal of her artistic vows: to follow her heart, her muses, her unfashionable desires -- no matter what it brings out in other people. It’s rarely easy to be Lana Del Rey, but Chemtrails will make you glad that somebody is doing it.

An elegiac, introverted release that feels more like a late-career meditation than the victory lap for "NFR!".