Icon: enlarge
US musician Lana del Rey
Photo: Neil Krug / Universal Music
Album of the week:
Lana Del Rey - "Chemtrails Over The Country Club"
Why shouldn't Lana Del Rey dream back to easier times?
This longing, which she formulates on the first song of her eighth album, can probably all relate to: Blinking in the sun, letting go of worries, "with my head in my hands, thinking of a simpler time," she sings in the " White Dress «, one of the best songs of her career so far.
Icon: enlarge
Album cover of "Chemtrails Over The Country Club"
The Americana songwriter, who is by the way a pop star, also has other reasons to wish herself back to a time when not every one of her words, every private and artistic gesture was judged according to identity-political dogmas.
Seldom has there been a popular musician who felt similarly challenged to vehemently defend her art persona, which played with gloom and submission fantasies, against the zeitgeist and the accusation of anti-feminism.
After that, everything the New Yorker, born in 1985 as Elizabeth Woolridge Grant, said was potentially controversial, whether it was about
people of color
in her circle of friends or her (very accurate) assessment of the Capitol storming in a BBC interview.
In justification monologues on Instagram, she explained the separation to media and magazines, which allegedly twisted everything willfully, with an angry "Fuck you".
With her album "Norman Fucking Rockwell" ("NFR"), the narrative brilliant snapshot of a tortured America, she had actually catapulted herself into the Olympus of US songwriting, but with those artistic ambivalences, abysmal abysses or religious quirks that one male colleagues as Dylan, Cohen or Cave admits, apparently does not apply to representatives of this genre.
At least Lana Del Rey has the feeling that it is so - that betrays her always a little self-righteous pose of private indignation.
Andreas Borcholte's playlist
Photo:
Christian O. Bruch / laif
Lana Del Rey:
Dark But Just a Game
Ryan Adams:
Who Is Going To Love Me Now, If Not You
Picture book:
day drinking
Magic Island:
Bury Me Alive
Elif:
You only love yourself
The P:
Enough
Meese x Hell:
necessity
Fritzi Ernst:
No appointments
Hawel / McPhail:
Pause Play
King Hannah:
State Trooper
Go to Spotify playlist Right arrow Go to Apple Music playlist Right arrow
With outrage, however, she is spot on in the zeitgeist, as in 2011, when her artfully faded art pop, endowed with American Hollywood and renegade myths, first manifested itself in the viral YouTube clip of "Video Games" - and became her trademark.
Since then there have been doubts about her authenticity, which she as an artist has never claimed.
Fortunately, on “Chemtrails Over The Country Club” she shows herself to be as unapologetic as she is resilient - and in top musical form.
The arrangements (produced by Jack Antonoff) are floating, wide open and transparent, a dreamy flow of country, small jazz characters and the most beautiful pop refrains that Del Rey has been writing for a long time.
The title song alone is an LDR classic: In the video, she defiantly satirizes the myth of the white, privileged ignorance bee, which is attributed to her, by driving herself provocatively and luxuriously to the mansion in a chic Mercedes classic car in the style of an undulating southern diva.
The "chemtrails" over this traditional dynasty structure are the conspiracy-theoretical poison that has diffused into social discourse.
Del Rey stages himself as a free radical somewhere in between.
"If you love me, you love me cause I'm wild at heart," she sings in "Wild at Heart," the reference to David Lynch is certainly intentional.
Because even if she longs to go back to the more innocent days as a nobody waitress with a white vest and uniform in "White Dress", Lana Del Rey in the great Americana fairy tale always remains the adventurous rose-red to Taylor Swift's snow-white nerd.
No wonder that the members of the Lana cult on TikTok show them smiling in their emblem in front of a burning car wreck: Anarchy is always a possibility in their songs, unconditional devotion to love and kitsch as well as self-confident autonomy and erupting wanderlust: “Not all who Wanderers are lost, «she knows - and has appropriated a male privilege of freedom.
display
Lana del Rey
Chemtrails Over The Country Club
Label: VIRGIN RECORDS
Availability: In stock.
binding: Audio CD
Label: VIRGIN RECORDS
Availability: In stock.
binding: Audio CD
approx. € 17.99
Price query time
March 19, 2021 6:19 p.m.
No guarantee
Icon: Info
Order at AmazonIcon: amazon
Order from ThaliaIcon: thalia
Order at WeltbildIcon: Weltbild
Product reviews are purely editorial and independent.
Via the so-called affiliate links above, we usually receive a commission from the dealer when making a purchase.
More information here
»Breaking Up Slowly« sums it up.
In the song she compares herself with country legend Tammy Wynette, whose "Stand By Your Man" (in this case country star George Jones) always serves as a musical testimony to female self-abandonment.
Del Rey turns it into a resistant waltz, which in case of doubt decides against the man, in favor of the blues and loneliness: “I don't wanna end up like Tammy Wynette.
It's hard to be lonely but it's the right thing to do ".
Then she gorgeous covers Joni Mitchell's "For Free", allegedly one of her early favorite pieces, which closes the nostalgic bracket to "White Dress" with an act of solidarity between 1970 and 2021 as a songwriter.
»Chemtrails« is more playful, encoded in more familiar Lana themes and motifs than the more mature and sublime »NFR«, but it is a stunningly casual manifesto of liberation from external constraints and disturbances.
The singer also tries her hand at musically, in the high-pitched head vocal drumming of “Not All Who Wander Are Lost” as well as in the Beatles trip-hop “Dark But Just A Game”, the Scott Walker-like “Yosemite” or the one about Bobbie Gentry reminiscent of funky country soul from "Dance Till We Die".
Hopefully she just lets it all speak for itself.
(8.5)
Listened briefly:
Ryan Adams - »Wednesdays«
Separate work and artist?
With Ryan Adams and “Wednesdays”, which is now available on CD and vinyl, the question is obsolete: the US songwriter self-pityingly but also humbly reflects on his fuck-ups and the allegations of abuse against him: “Woman, your silence brought me on my knees / Where I needed to be, «he sings.
You don't have to give anything, but it's his best album in a long time.
Damn it!
(8.0)
Meese x Hell - "Do not be afraid, do not be afraid, I am your fear"
Nothing against "nonsense among friends" ("FAZ")!
Performance art berserk Jonathan Meese and techno veteran DJ Hell unleashed associative Provo forces in the studio and landed somewhere between Yello, Kraftwerk and Rammstein.
Meese's rogue laugh is most beautiful when he dictatorially describes himself as “Dr.
No ”poses and rants about the“ Gesamtkunstwerk Germany ”: Art can do everything?
Apparently.
(7.8)
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson - "Theory of Ice"
Philosophers are rarely good pop musicians: Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, one of the most important indigenous voices in North America, is an exception in many ways.
The intellectual, activist, bestselling author and singer from Canada sets nature-mystical poems about climate change to gripping prostest folk on her third album.
The poetic addition to The Weather Station.
(8.0)
The P - »3, 14«
The black rapper from Bonn, who keeps her name a secret, is the figurehead of the hip-hop label 365XX, which only contracts women, trans people and nonbinary people.
Even with her »Tape« EP she proved to be a tough chronicler of the capitalist dreariness in her »district«.
On her debut album, she is now handing out musically more diverse, still accurate punches.
Collaboration with Disarstar, please!
(7.5)