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Caroline Polachek on the cover of her new album
Album of the week:
Caroline Polachek - »Desire, I Want to Turn Into You«
In the age of mindfulness, there are only a few pop records that hit you in the face with full force.
American singer Caroline Polachek's stunning second album, Desire, I Want to Turn Into You, is such a rarity.
Anyway: It's a pop album!
No rock, no R&B, no dance, no disco or electro - although all of this occurs in the fullest form in the 45 minutes of this record.
»Desire« is an almost old-fashioned pop album that spans genres and styles and is perhaps experiencing a renaissance in the enduring nineties revival.
At the end of last year, with their hit album »SOS«, which has since dominated the US charts, SZA demonstrated how to whisper the sweetest R&B revenge ballads, then suddenly transformed into a musically snotty successor to Avril Lavigne - and thus delighted a mass audience.
Caroline Polachek coolly adds a few doses of chutzpah to that: "Welcome To My Island" lures her to her wild, beautiful tropical island of dreams and longings in the first song.
Feelings are like a jungle to get lost in, so why not jump in and throw yourself in with full enthusiasm?
Appropriately, she begins the song with a siren song,
who could also be a Tarzan roar – and then swings into an almost machine-like chant to cool electrobeat chatter on the riff of an imaginary Bryan Adams song, before playing the Kate Bush heiress to which she already stylized by the British press.
Breathless already?
Polachek herself describes her approach to pop as maximalist, if not manic.
The album title, according to which not only sinks into desire, but also wants to dissolve completely in desire, can be taken literally: rarely has a pop album exuded such a feverish hunger for life.
A percussive background hustle and bustle runs through every song, including the ballad-like and quieter ones on the album, a restless flow of hissing beats and crunching noises, static noise or the impression of a jungle backdrop richly enlivened by animals.
The 37-year-old, who was born in New York and now commutes between LA and London, is something of a veteran.
With her former band Chairlift, Polachek had a fun indie hit about headstands that go wrong and bruises that are cooled with frozen raspberries ("Bruises"), for Beyoncé she co-wrote their song "No Angel", there were collaborations with Charli XCX, PC Music, Christine and the Queens and Blood Orange, the avant-gardists of hypermodern pop.
Their debut album Pang landed a viral TikTok hit in 2019 with "So Hot, You're Hurting My Feelings," which sounded a little like Fleetwood Mac in the "Tango In The Night" period.
From then on, it was clear to many pop watchers that Polachek was a pop star on hold.
With »Desire« she could now make this leap from the lively-cool off-artist to the mainstream.
The tropically lively »Sunset«, already released as a single in 2022, would have been the summer hit of the year if it hadn't been released in winter.
To airy pop and a sing-along refrain, she formulates something bittersweet: "These days I wear my body like an uninvited guest," she sings about the feeling of self-alienation that overcame many during the pandemic.
From the crisis in nursing and care facilities that became apparent during the Corona months, she draws the conclusion that social security and security in these times can only be had with the partner: »So many stories we were told about a safety net/ But when I look for it, it's just a hand that's holding mine."
The entire album is a high-spirited retreat into the bliss of togetherness, just as Polachek and her current boyfriend crumbled to the Mediterranean during the pandemic, and there, roughly at the foot of Mount Etna in Sicily, into an escapist world of Italian pop and carefree dolce vita dipped.
The volcano even appears in the song »Smoke«, one of many songs in which Polachek not only wants to melt with her partner mentally but also physically: »You are melting everything about me«, she sings.
She replies to the outside world that has gone mad that everything has to get even more crazy, but please in the spirit of headless love: »Throw it all out and replace it with a brand new kind of crazy«.
By the way, the album was released last Tuesday, Valentine's Day.
Crazy is also the music that plays to these daring lines.
As a child, Polachek often had to listen to Enya's esoteric-sacred bombast pop because her divorced parents wanted to calm her down with it.
Perhaps out of revenge, she keeps emulating their singing with her high-pitched bel canto voice;
the comparison with Kate Bush is no coincidence.
Her father, a classically trained musician who later moved into finance, passed away from Covid in 2020.
He was always against the fact that his daughter had turned to shallow pop, the relationship probably remained difficult until the end.
This is one of the reasons for Polachek's vehemence to ward off negative emotions with music that sounds confident but is agitated underground.
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Caroline Polachek
Desire, I Want to Turn Into You
Label: Perpetual Novice (membrane)
Label: Perpetual Novice (membrane)
approx. €21.59
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02/17/2023 6:32 p.m
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The influences and references in it whirl in a zeitgeisty manner, but always coherently, so that listening to Polachek's songs creates a pleasant intoxication.
"I Believe" forces the bubblegum pop of the noughties into a dubstep rhythm, "Fly To You" (with guest singers Dido and Grimes) then throws itself into fast drum'n'bass patterns, but even if the beats thicken, the sound remains as permeable and transparent as in groundbreaking productions by Talk Talk or Peter Gabriel from the eighties.
The individual elements seem all the more pointed and surprising, sometimes a flute, sometimes a jazz guitar motif, sometimes a bagpipe in "Blood and Butter", whose chorus in turn playfully refers to the nineties: to the one-hit wonder "No Rain" by Blind Melon .
In the loveliest ballad, »Butterfly Net«, Caroline Polachek tries to catch the moonlight over blissfully sleeping London with a butterfly net so she has something to hold on to when it's day again and things get complicated.
You can hear thick drops of water falling like tears.
Here at the latest you feel very close to Caroline Polachek and her happy-sad resilience music.
On the LP cover, she stalks like a thirsty lioness through the urban savannah of a subway car: Hunter of the Lost Ark.
"I'm looking for something/ That nobody else can see," she sings at one point on her magical album full of capricious love.
At least she has obviously found her sound.
(9.0)