ALBUMS

Desire, I Want to Turn

8.7
BEST NEW MUSIC

By Cat Zhang

GENRE: Pop/R&B

LABEL: Perpetual Novice

REVIEWED: February 14, 2023

Caroline Polachek’s best album of her

Desire can be volatile, excruciating,

wonderful, and cruel—but above all, it keeps

us going. We want and want and want until

we die, these small hopes urging us across the

vast expanse of our lives. Caroline Polachek—

pop auteur, emotional philosopher, hopeless

romantic—makes a muse of this tangled,

pervasive force on her virtuosic new

album, Desire, I Want to Turn Into You. She

knows too well that falling in love suffuses

you with possibility, makes a boring world

briefly beautiful. And so, as a nod to desire’s

transformational power, her album’s cover

displays her on all fours on the grimy subway,

lunging forward with a ravenous look in her

eyes. On one end of the car is the rat race; on

the other end, sand—a mirage of paradise.

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Polachek spent much of her career as one half

of the indie-pop band Chairlift in the

maddening, formative city of New York, and

more recently has split her time between Los

Angeles and London. In 2020, she decamped

to the idylls of the Mediterranean—blaring

’70s and ’80s Italo-pop out of a beat-up

station wagon with her boyfriend in Rome

and staying at the base of Mount Etna in

Sicily, marveling at the “faceless, tectonic,

chaotic energy coming up from below.”

Inspired by these excursions, the album takes

us to breathtaking places, all palm trees and

crystalline water, deep red sunsets and

smoke-covered volcanoes. On the ecstatic

“Welcome to My Island,” Polachek is Calypso

greeting a shipwrecked Odysseus, waving us

to her oasis. She channels a yearning as deep

blue as the ocean and howls like a wolf to the

moon.

While Polachek was constantly in transit on

her 2019 album Pang—descending with a

parachute, passing through a door to another

door—Desire is grounded in a more real sense

of place. Even on songs with few locational

details, you can feel the climate: An elusive

woman lives out an escapist fantasy on

“Bunny Is a Rider,” not checking her email

because she’s “AWOL on a Thursday.”

Satellites can’t find her because she’s

somewhere in the jungle: Hear the muggy,

tropical bassline, the faint bird chirps, the

static that resembles the rustle of fronds.

“Crude Drawing of an Angel” is staged below

the Earth’s surface amid dripping stalactites,

with jagged breaths creeping up from behind.

Polachek’s voice slices through the dank

atmosphere like a blade: “Forsake me/Here

on the ground/All or nothing,” she pleads,

begging for mercy from a lover whom she

knows will disappear.

Perhaps the “crude angel” is painter Paul

Klee’s Angelus Novus, the “angel of history”

who, in one famous account, looks with

horror upon the cumulative wreckage of

civilization, the damage wrought in the name

of glory and beauty. Polachek is not just a

swooning lover, but an aesthete and

philosopher attuned to contemporary

extremes, conceptualizing Desire during a

period of grand instability. During the

pandemic her father died of COVID-related

complications, and she saw cruelty all around

her as she contended with the cyclical nature

of disease, the fragility of the supply chain,

and the rancor of social media morality. “I

started thinking about how to re-harmonize

myself, and my music, with the reality that

there is a destructive side to everything,”

she said. On the flamenco-inspired “Sunset,”

Polachek dramatizes the pressure of new love

against the backdrop of a destitute society, a

collapsed infrastructure of care: “So many

stories we were told about a safety net/But

holding mine.”

The love explored on Desire is not the result

of a patient and sustainable partnership, but

a violent, all-or-nothing immersion. Implicit

in the wish in the album’s title, I Want to

Turn Into You, is the prospect of losing one’s

own sel"ood. Across the album, Polachek

indulges in the pleasure of obliteration and

surrender: “You are melting everything about

me,” she sings with her arms outstretched on

“Smoke.” On “Blood and Butter,” her

descriptions turn grotesque: She coos

breathlessly about diving through her lover’s

face and underneath his tattoos, longing to

be sustained by nothing “but the sun that’s in

our eyes.”

Sometimes Polachek seems so breathless

with desire that she can only come up to its

surface to gasp up a few intelligible lines at a

time. Bristling at our culture’s obsession with

literalism in art, she proffers, “I’m a deep

believer in what lies behind.” So songs like

“Pretty in Possible” dabble in Cocteau Twins-

style abstraction, blotted narratives featuring

mayflies and bloody noses. Sonically, the

song is Frou Frou meets “Tom’s Diner” with

its keychain-jangle beat, wordless a capella

stretches, and corkscrewed melodies.

Polachek and producer Danny L Harle started

it as an exercise in pure flow, no explicit

choruses or verses. Still, one sweet line

wrestles itself from the stream: “I was born to

get you home.”

The theme of mania is replicated in the

songs’ twisted, irregular structures. “Blood

and Butter” casts off its jacket and just to put

it on again, staging a fickle transition

between day and night and ending on an epic

bagpipe climax lifted out of “The Sensual

World.” “I Believe” is breakbeat pop fit for

a Lizzie McGuire trip to Rome, punctured by

glitchy, adrenal breaths that sound like a

cyborg subjected to shock therapy. The

album’s production veers from trip-hop to

new wave, trance to flamenco, demonstrating

an innate understanding of the pop archive

in pursuit of a new personal style. Each

creation seems marvelously its own: Who else

would pay tribute to their mercurial father

with petulant white-girl rapping and cheesy

stadium-rock guitar, or use a 1970s young

adult novel about an immortal family as

fodder for a shimmering Enya ballad?

The cumulative effect is like staring up at a

giant fresco, the detail so exquisite you can’t

decide where to rest your eyes first.

Flourishes appear in one place, then echo in a

new location—wings flapping, whistles

beckoning, blades slicing, bells chiming. She

opens Desire with her father’s warning to

“watch your head, girl” and concludes with

the image of a decapitated angel. But what

really binds the album is the dynamism of

Polachek’s vocals, the culmination of years of

bel canto operatic training and the hunger to

get it right. There is so much conviction in

her delivery that ceding space to anyone else,

even guest spots from Grimes and Dido, feels

like a disservice: Within the span of one song,

Polachek’s voice will smear like paint, swoop

like a crane, and bubble like lava.

All of the best attributes of Desire are

reflected on its closer “Billions,” a humid

tabla-pop song with medieval sound effects

and an over-the-top drone squiggle. Polachek

brings us into the throes of a shaky love

affair, doling out details in succulent little

morsels. “Salty flavor/Lies like a sailor/But he

loves like a painter,” she sings, evoking the

tangy taste of skin, the coarse vernacular of

the seaman, the uncalloused touch of the

artist. There’s something brilliant in how she

drops down an octave between verses, going

from the heady bliss of the evening to the

sobriety of the morning after, and how she

lends ordinary words their own strange

mouthfeel—“zay-zay-zay-something to me”

and “bill-lee-yaaans!” After running through

scenes of seduction and anguish, the song

appears to end on happy note: “I never felt so

close to you,” Polachek confesses, echoed by

the cherubic voices of the Trinity children’s

choir. But being close-to is still not the same

as being subsumed by, having turned into. So

we nudge and nudge and nudge, never quite

reaching fulfillment, longing until the end.

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Caroline
Polachek: Desire, I
Want to Turn Into
You

$ 2 3 AT R O U G H
TRADE

$ 2 3 AT A M A ZO N

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