One of pop music's biggest breakout stars, Caroline Polachek has been testing the limits of the genre to great critical acclaim. Izzy Morris investigates her latest release.
After the immense success of her last album Pang, expectations were certainly high for Caroline Polachek’s next project. She has well and truly carved out a unique space in the music industry with her brand of avant-pop, as seen within her work as part of Chairlift, and through her other solo projects under the pseudonyms Ramona Lisa and CEP. Desire, I Want to Turn into You has proved what we all already suspected (and hoped) to be true; Caroline Polachek is a creative force that shows no sign of stopping.
The album opens, with a beautiful, resonant outcry from Caroline Polachek, bringing in Welcome to My Island. The track launches into hyperpop-esque cascading synths, and robotic harmonies. While not a typical convention for displaying deep desire and emotional resonance, her creative and convention defying strategy here works; the soundscape she creates is transformative, perfectly demonstrating that feeling of wanting to lose herself to the person she’s infatuated with. “Desire, I Want to Turn into You”, the album’s title, features as a lyric in this track, and I genuinely believe it is one of the strongest lines in pop music of recent years. Imagine being so incredibly in love with someone that the extent of that desire is so profound that you literally want to become them. She manages to capture a ridiculously powerful concept in a danceable and musically interesting way.
She then moves into a Pretty In Possible, an experiment in flow. Using this song as an exercise in allowing a train of thought to escape, structurally the song avoids having a clear cut chorus or verse, and instead is a gorgeous extended melody. This approach to song writing is incredibly interesting to me, and once again explains why there is just so much soul to the album. This free-flowing track swings through her thoughts in a way that in part bears similarities to the idea of Taan in Indian classical music, in the sense that it feels improvisational and meditative, vocally. You also get these beautiful moments that feel like her coming up for breath when she demonstrates her incredible talent with soaring high notes. This experiment with flow is constructed with a very relevant, but more divergent feature; an old school hip-hop style beat underlying the track. This gives the song legs, physically, walking you through Polachek’s more abstract lyrics and ideas. Think Susanne Vega and DNA on Tom’s Diner for a new generation; those are the ingredients of this track, down to the repeated ‘la di da’ motif throughout the track.
"Polachek has explored both the limits of pop music and the depths of desire, while retaining a quality we can safely expect"
The album experiments further with meshing together unlikely genres with the very clear Spanish influences on Sunset – another interesting take on the brief of desire. Exploring reckless passion that Caroline is running towards, the track feels very much like a holiday – a fairytale-esque intense feeling that exists seperately from every day, once again relating to the transformative experience of love. It does everything I wish Clean Bandit and MARINA’s Baby had done a few years ago; it’s still danceable and has those gorgeous operatic vocals, but it retains a sense of intimacy.
Desire also features a dedication to the incredible hyper-pop visionary SOPHIE, who unfortunately passed away in 2021. The track I Believe tackles immortality and death, all wrapped up in a breakbeat, glitchy production. Once again, the album serves as a musical laboratory to explore love and passion, with the album going from trance to disco to hyperpop to Spanish classical. And somehow, it all still feels cohesive.
One of the absolute highlights of the album is Fly To You, which combines the stunning vocals of Dido with the weird and wonderful world of Grimes. The track combines the trio’s ethereal, delicate voices and puts them against a drum and bass beat, with dazzling synths in a way that conjures up those feelings of soaring towards someone, and reuniting. This is a collaboration I’d never have expected to come out from the album, particularly the Dido feature, but it works exceptionally well.
And then there are points where Caroline Polachek strips things back a little bit; Butterfly Net and Hopedrunk Everlasting both feel incredibly tender, showcasing her incredible tone and sense of feeling within her vocals. Butterfly Net in particular is one of the strongest points for me on the album, with its otherworldly harmonies and modest, chiming percussion that sounds like pans being hit in a kitchen. Then when you read this choice in with the lyrics, which relate to holding onto things from the past, retaining souvenirs… using different items for the beat feels so ridiculously intelligent. This is what the album, and indeed Polachek’s work is; intelligent pop.
Desire, I Want to Turn Into You comes to a conclusion with Billions, which features plenty of distortion within its production, almost like you’re lost in time. Ending with a beautiful appearance from a children’s church choir, the album closes with grandiosity, like taking a final bow. What a feat from the pop pioneer.
With this album, Polachek has explored both the limits of pop music and the depths of desire, while retaining a quality we can safely expect from the singer-songwiter, producer and visionary. It questions the nature of love and of infatuation and the way that it makes us act beyond reason and upon impulse, in a way that is both human and philosophical. Even if you’re not playing such close attention to the content of every lyric, her voice is still arresting and beckons you to pull up a chair and listen. It goes from being hauntingly beautiful to contagiously dance-y in a way that just makes sense. This is a triumph from Polachek once again.
Edited by: Ali Glen
Photos courtesy of Caroline Polachek's Instagram. Videos courtesy of Caroline Polachek's YouTube.
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