LANA lightens up (a little)
Pop’s ‘good girl gone bad’ delivers a new album that’s — whisper it — verging on the upbeat
LANA DEL REY is often accused of sticking to a tried and trusted formula. There’s undoubtedly something compelling about her character-driven songs but she has also fallen back, repeatedly, on her brooding, good-girl-gone-bad persona since breaking through with the magnificent Video Games single ten years ago.
On her seventh album, there are signs the mask is starting to slip. True to form, Chemtrails Over The Country Club is packed with leisurely ballads, moody arrangements and evocative tales of skewed romance.
This time, though, there are fewer badboy lovers and a sense that we’re getting glimpses of the woman raised as Lizzy Grant, as well as her alter ego Lana.
She has clearly been itching to try something different for some time. Her last release, Violet Bent Backwards Over The Grass, was an LP of spoken-word poetry.
Late last year, she hinted that an album of American songbook standards was imminent. That was quietly shelved, though she did release covers of You’ll Never Walk Alone and George Gershwin’s Summertime.
Now, as she lowers her emotional guard, she’s also shifting the dial musically. Over the past decade, she has deviated only sporadically from a lush, retro-pop template. Here, co-producers Jack Antonoff and Rick Nowels add refreshing folk, country and jazz twists without diluting the essential Lana-ness of it all.
AmORE honest tone is obvious from the outset. White Dress finds Del Rey, singing in a wispy soprano, gazing back longingly on her days as a teenage waitress obsessed with indie-rock bands The White Stripes (‘when they were white hot’) and Kings Of Leon.
The title track goes back farther; to a middle-class childhood in upstate New York. Sung in a huskier tone, it even mentions her photographer sibling Chuck — ‘me and my sister just playing it cool’ — against a backdrop of jazzily brushed drums and humming electronics.
Since she moved from New York to California in 2012, her songs have explored West Coast life. On Chemtrails, her American bus tour takes her farther afield. She visits the Bible Belt on Tulsa Jesus Freak; and Lincoln, Nebraska (a Springsteen-esque touch) on hypnotic road song Not All Who Wander Are Lost. No Del Rey album would be complete without some knowing cultural, references and Chemtrails doesn’t disappoint.
Two songs mention a candle in the wind. The swooning ballad Let me Love You Like A Woman contains a nod to Prince’s Purple Rain. On Dance Till We Die, she sings about covering Joni mitchell... which she then does, on albumcloser For Free. Fans will enjoy looking for other cookies.
Her move away from pop towards Americana is cemented with guest appearances from three female singers. Breaking Up Slowly is a wry country lament which features Nashville highway queen Nikki Lane.
Zella Day and Weyes Blood have cameos on the Joni mitchell cover, a faithfully reproduced piano ballad that contrasts the simple integrity of a New York street busker with the more complicated life of a pampered rock star. It’s a wonderfully nuanced finale to an album that’s more upbeat than anything its maker has produced before. There’s even one acoustic number, Yosemite, that was omitted from 2017’s Lust For Life because Del Rey felt its cheery sentiments jarred with that album’s downbeat mood.
It sits well here, suggesting that Lana can afford to smile without losing her mystique.
TAYLOR SWIFT’S Folklore, which this week won best album at the Grammys, is the obvious inspiration for Paramore singer Hayley Williams’s second solo record. Williams made the album alone in her Nashville home, and its pared-down folk-rock — a far cry from Paramore’s punky pop — has all the hallmarks of a classic quarantine collection.
Conceived as a prequel to last year’s more robust solo debut, Petals For Armor, it was launched without fanfare last month — its release so low-key that the ‘promotion’ campaign consisted of Hayley hand-delivering CDs to surprised local fans in Tennessee. many of its candid songs examine the upheavals that followed the singer’s 2017 divorce from musician Chad Gilbert, of rock band New Found Glory.
‘Don’t know whether to feel sad or proud,’ she sings on Good Grief, while her regrets are more apparent on No Use I Just Do, a love song of haunting tenderness. The short instrumental Descansos refers to home-made roadside shrines.
Playing everything herself, Williams still manages to create a varied musical palate. First Thing To Go combines piano, guitar and multi-tracked vocals. Asystole employs delicate electronics.
As lockdowns slowly ease, albums made in isolation might start to lose their impact. This one deserves a listen, regardless of the context. n NICK JONAS — youngest member of former teen-pop sensations the Jonas Brothers — is in a lovey-dovey mood on solo album Spaceman. With Adele’s producer, Greg Kurstin, supplying hazy synths and slick backbeats, he rarely strays from a smooth, midtempo blueprint.
He’s a fine singer, deploying his soulful falsetto on Don’t Give Up On U before doffing his cap to Foreigner’s I Want To Know What Love Is on Deeper Love. The title track tackles the loneliness of lockdown. But too many of these tepid songs lack personality.
An exception is Death Do Us Part, which suggests the past year may have done something strange to Nick’s tastebuds.
Using food metaphors to show the strength of his love, he declares: ‘This is caviar . . . with some Pringles.’ And they say romance is dead.