Chemtrails Over the Country Club - Post-Release Discussion Thread + Poll

[bluejeans4804 16]

I'm really late but I'm crying happy tears. Also this album works with every drug I've tried tonight

[Nobody 21,298]

5 minutes ago, Poor Stacy said:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/artists/lana-del-rays-chemtrails-country-club-gorgeous-musing-price/

 

GUYS

 

We got another 5/5 from Telegraph 

 

That's big 

 

Justin getting 2/5 right underneath 

[EndlessSummer 3,392]

Telegraph review 5/5

 

 A simmering, sinister undercurrent flows through Lana Del Rey’s most sensuous album to date. Chemtrails Over the Country Club is another gorgeously enigmatic showpiece from a singer-songwriter who revels in private ambiguities in the dazzling glare of audacious songcraft.

The tartly turned title song offers a blaze of harmonic heat, conjuring images of carefree days in a setting of pampered luxury that verges on soft-focus lifestyle porn. Yet even as she lies around the private member’s swimming pool with her equally pampered friends, Del Rey wants us to know she has one eye on the poisonous pollution cutting through the perfect blue skies. It is a perfect metaphor for a career constructed on the principle that she will have her cake and eat it, even if it sticks in her throat.

Ever since struggling pop wannabe Lizzie Grant artfully re-branded herself with media-savvy panache as Lana Del Rey in 2011, she has maintained a quality of artistic mysteriousness almost unheard of in the social media age. The blend between image and music is so tightly fashioned, Del Rey can appear as vacuously stylized as an Instagram filter. The fascinating question that looms with each new offering is to what extent Del Rey is satirising a contemporary fixation with style over substance, or merely indulging it. It is a question her ninth album takes considerable pleasure in evading.

The opening track, White Dress, is sumptuous, free-flowing tumble of double bass, piano and feather-light jazz drums that hints at the liberation of Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks. Her voice whispery and yet exultant, rising to a soulful falsetto, Del Rey summons memories of being a waitress at the Miami Business Music Conference, aged 19, recalling the sense of openness and joy as her whole life promised to open up before her. But the note of melancholy that is never far from the surface of Del Rey’s oeuvre is sounded in the sombre closing notes, as she wonders if “Maybe I was better off.”

That is the theme all these songs circle around, as the pop star repeatedly questions the price of fame, dreams of escape from the big city pressures, or turns her mind to childhood memories and rural idylls. “No roses left on the vine / Don’t even want what’s mine / Much less the fame” she mournfully croons on Dark But Not A Game. There are repeated references to candles in the wind, pop culture shorthand (via Elton John and Bernie Taupin) for the fates that befell Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana.

The camera had flashes / They caused the car crashes” she notes on lush album highlight Wild At Heart (another borrowed reference to doomed romance, from David Lynch via Barry Gifford), before adding “But I’m not a star.” Once again, Del Rey is looking nostalgically back to a time when all she wanted was the very thing she now fears is killing her. “If they love me, they’ll love me cause I’m wild at heart,” she croons, narcissistically self-mythologising her own doomed star girl persona.

It is hard to measure to what extent the ambiguous depths of Del Rey’s music arise from artistic insight and arch self-awareness or are built up through layers and layers of woolly thinking and self-contradiction. But does that even matter, when her melodic flair is so assured (there are passages in Beatle-esque genius in Dark But Not A Game) and moody arrangements so richly detailed?

Chemtrails Over the Country Club is an album on which Del Rey drifts even further from the pop mainstream, entirely jettisoning shiny beats and electronic hooks along the way. Yet 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.

Dance Til We Die finds Del Rey trying to reconcile feelings of being “burdened by the weight of fame” with an escapist joy in music itself. Yet for anyone dazzled by the lifestyle she plainly revels in, cosy first name references to such role models as Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez and Stevie Nicks may come across as so much name dropping.

Del Rey ties up loose ends with a lusciously rearranged and harmonised Joni Mitchell cover, For Free, a song that examines the price of fame with a forensic clarity that only serves to emphasise the vagueness inherent in Del Rey’s own lyrics. “Me I play for fortunes and those velvet curtain calls,” sings Del Rey, enviously watching a busker (who could be an incarnation of young Del Rey herself) playing for sheer joy. Be careful what you wish for may be an overused trope, yet it has never sounded quite so seductive.

 

 

[StillOnMyMind 2,058]

Can The Guardian stop doing reviews once and for all? They are disgusting with every single artist out there, Jesus.

[FallingCherry 7,731]

All of the 5/5 reviews she’s getting should hopefully be enough to balance The Guardian’s stupid review

[Ultra Violet 18,421]

"It's dark but just a game, so play it like a symphony.

You know our love's the same. They'll both go down in infamy" 

 

This has become my favourite couple of lines ever and I can't explain why!

[Make me your Dream Life 83,144]

soft-focus lifestyle porn. that's accurate yeah, love that 

[CinnamonGay 10,513]

IM ON THE  RUN LISTENING TO COCC

THERE IS  NOTHING WRONG

IN STREAMING IT MORE

TO GET LANA A NUMBER OOOOOONNEEEEEEEEE

[Whitemustang 457]

The reviews are amazing! I was not expecting so much praise... she did it!!!

[MrFameKills 10,439]

5 minutes ago, EndlessSummer said:

Telegraph review 5/5

 

It is a question her ninth album takes considerable pleasure in evading.

[Nobody 21,298]

3 minutes ago, MrFameKills said:

 

AKA, BTD, P, UV, HM, LFL, NFR, VBBOTG, COCC 

[honeymo0n 8,590]

27 minutes ago, soaringHigh said:

Whoever is bittersweet with this album.....

 

Relisten.Relisten.RELISTEN.REFUCKINGLISTEN.

 

i was one of those to quickly claim it as my favorite Lana album ever(no skips) and GOD THIS ALBUM IS A FUCKING DRUG ? I am so in love ? I can’t even claim a favorite song yet and it’s been more than a week every song creeps its way into you I am so glad this was released. I don’t even get the people calling it lazy especially with the Apple Digital Mastering this sounds EXQUISITE instrumentally.

ikr! It's so difficult to pick one favourite track

[AphroditeBaby 912]

2 minutes ago, MrFameKills said:

Sirens, AKA, BTD, Paradise, Ultraviolence, Honeymoon, Lust for Life, Norman Fucking Rockwell, COCC, duh 

[Poor Stacy 11,993]

That Telegraph review is excellent. It felt like someone summarizing my feelings on the album.

[baddisease 15,869]

can someone link me to the Guardian review?

 

also i fucking love Tulsa Jesus Freak

[GetFree 1,861]

……. SO WE MADE A PACT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT!!!!  

[EndlessSummer 3,392]

3 minutes ago, baddisease said:

can someone link me to the Guardian review?

 

also i fucking love Tulsa Jesus Freak

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/mar/19/lana-del-rey-chemtrails-over-the-country-club-review

[honeymo0n 8,590]

3 minutes ago, GetFree said:

……. SO WE MADE A PACT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT!!!!  

lol I thought it was "we made it back in the middle of the night"....

[DealerBitch 147]

Hi guys!

 

so me and my best friend tend to do something special for our first listen of a new Lana album. Since NFR was such a beach album, I would’ve suggested our first listen to be at the beach but obviously I haven’t heard the music yet so I wouldn’t know.

 

So that’s why I wanna ask you guys. What should the setting of our first listen be? What vibes does the album give off?

[99centlips 8,518]

Just now, VeniceFag said:

Hi guys!

 

so me and my best friend tend to do something special for our first listen of a new Lana album. Since NFR was such a beach album, I would’ve suggested our first listen to be at the beach but obviously I haven’t heard the music yet so I wouldn’t know.

 

So that’s why I wanna ask you guys. What should the setting of our first listen be? What vibes does the album give off?

 

hmmm maybe a field or near a ranch