I’m Having Difficulty Processing Caroline Polachek’s Art Pop Odyssey
Desire, I Want To Turn Into You has arrived, and… holy shit.
If I’m not careful, this could end up sounding a lot like the 2023 version of Brent DiCrescenzo’s infamous review of Kid A. But in an open-hearted embrace of Desire’s spirit of recklessness and passion, I’m deliberately not going to be careful.
Oh, where do I begin?
Lifechangingrevolutionaryneverdonebeforeculturalresetonceinagenerationmasterpiece…
(Deep breath)
Last month, Caroline Polachek took to Twitter to criticize journalists’ uninspired tendency to label her “this generation’s Kate Bush,” prompted by a recent article in The Guardian which – surprise, surprise – did exactly that. Why is it that every remarkably talented woman in music is forced to endure a period of reductive comparisons until enough time has passed that the next generation of female artists starts getting compared to them?
“While I realize it’s a huge compliment, I’m endlessly fucking annoyed by being told I’m “this generation’s Kate Bush”. SHE is our generation’s Kate Bush, she is an active artist who’s topping the charts, and is irreplaceable. I, meanwhile, am this generation’s Caroline Polachek.”
– Caroline Polachek (@carolineplz)
Rather, it’s more accurate to say that Polachek belongs to a long lineage of distinct songstresses and art pop auteurs. She’s firmly a part of the pantheon. In case you are one of the uninitiated, Polachek is a singer-songwriter-producer who has been writing and performing music for 15 years.
In the first decade of her career, she released under various aliases – as part of the indie pop trio-then-duo Chairlift, as her alter ego Ramona Lisa, and as her other alter ego CEP – and only started releasing solo music under her own name as recently as 2019. That “debut” album, Pang, was really her sixth, and consequently, a modern triumph from a seasoned maestro. (BTW, if you’re interested in exploring her discography, check out Frail State of Mind’s in-depth guide here!)
Her highly-anticipated follow up Desire, I Want To Turn Into You is the product of an informed visionary and experienced artist who can seamlessly infuse her knowledge of art pop history with her boundless songwriting talent, inimitable vocal capabilities, keen emotional intelligence, and heightened intuition for the future of music.
Desire is a post-everything genre fusion. Polachek possesses a knack for drawing from all corners and eras of music at once to create one-of-a-kind, forward-thinking mixtures still deeply rooted in pop tradition and vivid, emotive storytelling. The touchpoints of the record include everything from Y2K-era “CVS Core” and late ‘90s electronica to Spanish flamenco and Celtic folk, all melded together and reinterpreted in a way that feels sacred. There’s yodeling and guitar solos and swirling trip-hop beats and god damn bagpipes. There are features from Grimes as well as the elusive Dido… on the same song. It’s simultaneously futuristic and antiquated, sweetly accessible and adventurously avant-garde. It’s an eschewing of all trends so defiantly that she’s the one on the cutting edge, unwittingly starting new ones.
Polachek’s world building collapses time and space not only in its sonic patchwork but in its visual aesthetics, too. In the Desire universe, there is equal reverence for ancient mythology and ‘90s video games (*ahem* we’re talking Lara Croft versus the Minotaur). It’s a surrealistic merging of grit with decadence – she’s wearing couture on public transit and serving wine to children in secret goblets. Recurring elements include scuffed subway cars and active volcanoes, beige Koss porta pros and satin ribbons, fresh tattoos and peeling sunburns, wiry crochet and honeyed leather, ripening grapes and trails of ants.
The road to this record has been a long and winding one, riddled with a detailed trail of Easter eggs, a slow drip of singles, and Polachek’s signature perfectionism.
“Bunny Is A Rider,” her flawless ode to being unavailable and the first official taste of Desire, was originally released way back in July 2021, already teasing song titles and critical motifs throughout the cardboard box maze of the music video. Meanwhile, she played “Sunset,” a “Gerudo Valley”-channeling flamenco love song, in her live concerts for over a year to “to let it morph,” until finally releasing the studio version this past fall. Desire also presents the studio version of “Smoke,” another track that’s been performed live for ages. Turns out it’s easily one of her best songs ever, with lush, layered production and a beautiful melody that is so perfect it’s like it was unearthed.
So trust, the prolonged wait and suspense was worth it. Forgive me if this sounds hyperbolic, but her methodical approach has produced what is not only her magnum opus but also may go down as the singular greatest pop record of this decade.
Stop waxing poetic and write about the music!
If Pang was Polachek’s divorce album, Desire is about a relapse into love, a sort of matured return to the themes of her 2016 Chairlift release Moth. The album opens with the irresistibly opulent and bratty anthem “Welcome to My Island.” The central refrain of this track is where the album’s title is derived from and ultimately acts as the manifesto for the entire project to follow. Polachek has clarified that the meaning of “Desire, I want to turn into you” is twofold – it’s about a love so deep that you want to fuse with the other person, as well as the desire to literally become desire itself. Within the span of three minutes and fifty three seconds, you’ll experience wild expressionistic howling, rapping á la Blondie’s “Rapture,” and a bombastic guitar solo.
Eagle-eared listeners noted that the repeated “hey, hey, heys” are in fact a sample of Pang ballad “Look at Me Now,” an appropriate callback to her past in the early moments of the record. Polachek told Crack Magazine that “Welcome to My Island” is about “simmering in your own ego, not getting out of your own head and spiraling.” From here, the record follows the journey of her “ego-death.”
Desire is largely an experimental affair, and is truly astounding in how well-produced it is. While Pang’s closest classical element was Air, Desire’s is certainly Earth. Many of the tracks juxtapose fast-paced, metallic, thunderous beats and beeps with warmer, organic instrumentation and the natural beauty of Polachek’s Siren-like vocals, such as “Pretty In Possible” and “Crude Drawing of an Angel.” There are lots of passages where Polachek slips into wordless vocalizations and utilizes her voice as a pure instrument.
“Blood and Butter,” the fifth single and eighth track on the album, is a gorgeous ode to love featuring a Ray of Light-esque synthesis of bright acoustic guitar and congas with synths straight out of William Orbit’s playbook, not to mention a bagpipe solo courtesy of Scottish piper Brìghde Chaimbeul. “Blood and Butter” fully realizes what Lorde attempted on her 2021 LP Solar Power – a wholly romantic homage to the once-maligned palette of the ‘90s and early ‘00s, emphasizing earthly pleasures and human connection. Polachek’s lyrics evoke the beauty of nature with mentions of “holy water” and “fire in the sky,” describing the world as a bed of “green and ribbon red.” “Look how I forget who I was / Before I was the way I am with you,” she sings, further chronicling the progression of her ego-death. “Butterfly Net” is a similarly stellar achievement in ballad form, which ascends to a new astral plane in the final minute with harmonization from the children’s choir that also appears on “Billions.”
Broadly, much of Desire’s visual and aural mood board goes hand-in-hand with the collective craving for a return to that not-so-distant time which has become associated with a cozy warmth and a pre-Internet slowness. Polachek’s world evokes memory-holed ‘90s-core like Pure Moods, Lilith Fair, and vibey coffee shops (see: the ethos of the “Un-Grammable Hang Zone”), with an added dose of mysticism.
However, Polachek always retains one foot in the present, much like her “nostalgic futurist” contemporaries The 1975 and Weyes Blood.1 Desire is still firmly and fundamentally a post-Internet work of art. She’s “sexting sonnets” to her beau, who is “mythological and Wikipediated.” In the video for “Sunset,” the aging architecture and natural beauty of Barcelona is juxtaposed with the inescapable presence of iPhones. The “independence fantasy” of “Bunny Is A Rider” finds her evading satellites, lusting to disappear in an age where we’re expected to be always “on” and available.
Then there’s just the timelessness and genrelessness of it all. On “I Believe,” co-produced and written with Ariel Rechtshaid, Polachek seamlessly incorporates a fiery club track into the record, featuring a UK garage beat in the vein of a PinkPantheress or George Daniel production. Meanwhile, the unlikely collaboration on “Fly To You” makes for a surprisingly spectacular collision of three experimental icons from three different decades, as the ethereal voices of Grimes, Polachek, and Dido weave in and out while being complimented by a sun-soaked guitar riff.
On the massive, trip-hop inspired album closer “Billions,” Polachek declares that the ego-death has been complete and that she has completely submitted to desire. No longer lost and alone on her island, she celebrates “the afterglow of a reopening” and announces that she has “never felt so close” to her lover.
Lyrically, “Billions” is richly intimate and feels like Polachek’s reinterpretation of Björk’s “Cocoon,” but sonically, it’s an outlandishly ethereal, contemporary update of the Massive Attack classic she’s been known to cover, “Teardrop,” with what I previously described as a “gorgeous, orbiting, galactic crescendo of crystalline sound” that she crafted alongside co-producer Danny L Harle. The song spirals out over the course of nearly five minutes, forgoing a traditional verse/chorus structure to make the listener feel “lost inside the song.”
Polachek’s songs usually have refined cold endings, which is why “Billions” is unusual in its resort to the dated fade-out technique. This song has been out for over a year now, and in time its become apparent that it is the perfect way to end this perfect song, and by extension, perfect record. I arrived to this realization when I ordained the track the (entirely weightless) accolade of Frail State Of Mind’s Song of 2022:
As “Billions” comes to its final coda, Polachek is joined by the Trinity Croydon Children’s Choir, and their voices become one, fading into oblivion… On some level, it works to suggest that the refrain will continue on forever in its own universe – as if the listener is gently falling back down to Earth, watching as Polachek and her choir float away singing on, ad infinitum.
Conversations about the musical canon tend to push the narrative that the finest days of music are behind us, that they are the stuff of legend. That there will never be another record to live up to the canon with, say, Blue or Hounds of Love or Vespertine.
The reality is that this is ludicrous. They may not arrive often, but rest assured, masterpieces will continue to be created.
Desire, I Want To Turn Into You is proof. •
Peep her cameo in the Welcome to My Island music video!