Lana Del Rey review, Chemtrails over the Country Club: Damn-near impossible to resist

Arts columnists and Twitter users may still be debating Lana Del Rey’s tone-deaf Instagram posts, in which she defended herself against accusations of racism and glamourising the abuse of women. But she blows smoke at them on her seventh album with a breezy, “I don’t care what they think/ Drag racing my little red sports car/ I’m not unhinged or unhappy, I’m just wild…” And it’s damn near impossible to resist parking the pressure to make complicated judgements about the woman, and just let her take you for an escapist spin into her dreamy, retro-romantic world. 

Chemtrails over the Country Club opens with the sweet, lacy whisper of “White Dress”. It’s a song that sees the 35-year-old celebrity yearning for the days when she was 19 and waitressing. In a recent interview with Mojo magazine, she spoke about the pleasure she takes in being “of service”. Here she luxuriates in that fantasy and the pleasure she took in being the youthful object of the male gaze: “Down at the men in music business conference ... I only mention it ’cause it was such a scene/ And I felt seen, mm ... Made me feel like a god.” 

There’s a delicacy to the new melodies, which take their time to sink their pretty little hooks into the brain. She’s toned down lush orchestration of Norman F***ing Rockwell, opting for more acoustic guitar-picking. This is accessorised with scuffs of scuzzy electric guitar and trip-hoppy hotel lobby organ.  

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. In the Lanaverse, most things feel sexy-sad. Honestly, if music could wear make-up then hers would always go with smokey eyes and a vintage up flick of liquid liner. Sometimes it would be smudged with tears or be left over from the night before, because Del Rey is always waltzing her way between the fetishised versions of the country club and the trailer park. One minute she’s wearing jewels in the swimming pool, the next she’s “getting high in a parking lot”. 

Although Del Rey made her name channelling the deeper, duskier voices of noir vamps like Lauren Bacall on hits such as “Video Games”, the knowing girlish sibilance of “White Dress” winks back at Marilyn Monroe: wearer of the most iconic white dress in movie history. A dreamy piano melody rolls beneath Del Rey’s sighs, while a slide guitar and brushed cymbals capture the Orlando heat.

The percussion is great throughout Chemtrails. Drums thud, like muffled heartbeats, through the sleepy-sultry nest-building plea of “Let Me Love You Like a Woman”. Palms slap tropical-beachy bongos on the countrified “Yosemite”, where she sings “isn’t it cool how nothing changes” like an outlaw Nancy Sinatra. A click track adds a trancey element to “Tulsa Jesus Freak”. A tambourine rattles tension into the pulse of the Beatles-esque “Dark But Just a Game”, and snares come rattling in with surprising force at the end of the title track.  

Del Rey says she has been recording country songs, and the melodrama of the genre is certainly a perfect fit with her brand. You can hear her teasing a little Tammy “Stand By Your Man” Wynette spirit into songs like “Wild at Heart”. I wonder if she knows that Wynette was cheating on her husband when she recorded that song? Interestingly, she ends the record with a loving, upbeat cover of Joni Mitchell’s “For Free”. Mitchell also disappointed feminists by refusing to sign up to the cause. I bet Del Rey knows that. I bet she doesn’t care.