Caroline Polachek
Desire, I Want to Turn Into You

Falsely debuting in 2019 with her album “Pang”, the first release not under a pseudonym in a career as an author, composer, vocalist, and producer spanning almost fifteen years, Caroline Polachek managed at the time to generate considerable hype around her name, especially in the more demanding circuits of the music press, which praised her pop writing and the meticulousness with which she managed to create a sound halfway between organic and cybernetic, all accompanied by a painstaking attention to image, with which she crafted a very particular and personal world full of realism and mysticism. In practice, with these premises, there were two paths: to release a merely decent follow-up that would again make people talk about the new promise of alternative pop from across the sea, but with much less enthusiasm than before, or to finally break through. With a confidence that is frightening, Polachek has taken the second path with “Desire, I Want to Turn Into You,” an album that has practically everyone shouting 'masterpiece' and which has cemented her as one of the most interesting names in the current music scene.

And so the hype surrounding her name, instead of deflating, has grown exponentially and indeed, with the album in hand, it is difficult to contradict all this enthusiasm because fundamentally it is almost impossible to find another emerging artist who has the same knowledge and command of their means as demonstrated by Caroline Polachek. To her long experience as a singer and musician, matured first in Chairlift and then in the solo project Ramona Lisa, the artist adds a hunger for sounds and musical stimuli that translates into an omnivorous and multi-faceted album, where in the same tracklist follows the hyper-pop of "Welcome to My Island", the industrial dance of “I Believe” and the gypsy siren singing of “Sunset”, not missing a good hangover of tribal percussion and bagpipes in “Blood and Butter”, which seems to come straight from “The Sensual World” by Kate Bush. And the rollercoaster of influences and genres touched continues, between precisely calibrated arrangements and a melodic attention capable of producing both extremely catchy pieces and real streams of consciousness in music (see the trip-hop of “Pretty in Possible”), not missing a couple of special guest appearances (“Fly to You”, with Dido and Grimes) and some more intimate episodes (the splendid “Hopedrunk Everasking” and “Butterfly Net”). In all this, that half dreamy and futuristic mood that had made the debut so successful returns strongly, but here it is further strengthened and qualitatively very close to the best episodes of Imogen Heap's career, with whom Polachek shares many ideas in musical and vocal research. Paradoxically, however, her voice is something unique and original in its own way: Caroline, in fact, besides being one of the few healthy carriers of autotune, is endowed with a very flexible instrument, capable of weaving country yodel, modern singing and a fair mastery of the highest registers (which in some cases even border on operatic singing) for a pastiche that on paper may not make sense, but which upon listening proves to be an essential element of the sonic framework of her songs. And in the end, the album's strength lies precisely in this: As with her vocal style, Polachek takes a little bit of everything she likes or finds musically stimulating and integrates it into her compositions, but she does so with such a solid overall vision that even the potentially most out-of-place intuitions instead acquire their precise reason for being within the general body; a sort of Frankenstein's monster on which such a refinement work has been done that the seams holding the parts together are almost invisible.

If Caroline Polachek will actually be able to chart the path on which pop music will move in the coming years, frankly, it seems too early to say, and here, perhaps, it is possible to place a slight brake on the enthusiasm expressed so far by industry magazines, which seem to compete to exalt her with increasingly acrobatic and elaborate praises. The fact remains, however, that we are faced with a very solid album, almost perfect from start to finish and with very few smudges, capable like few others of combining accessibility and sophistication and of positioning itself, indeed, in its own unique musical bubble, which in itself is already quite something. It will be up to Caroline not to make it burst, but if these are the premises, there is at least reason to be hopeful.