Look over the edge - but not too far

Continuing my trip down The Guardian's top 50 albums of 2023

#3 : Desire, I Want To Turn Into You - Caroline Polachek

Throughout her fourth solo album, Caroline Polachek is a technically immaculate vocalist, tracing complex melodies as if matching the light-trail of a sparkler wielded by a toddler, but she’s never showing off. The meaning of Desire, I Want to Turn Into You itself is carried in how these vocal lines search high and low, babbling in excited melody, yearning hard to reach top notes, or occasionally speaking in a careful monotone: this is a drama about the all-consuming nature of desire, played out across very topography of Polachek’s perfect voice. This is perhaps Polachek’s lane: being the bard for a generation of digitally savvy, cultural cherry-pickers for whom irony is so dull, even hateful, compared with loving something intensely.

I've been aware of Caroline for a few years now and popped in to see her at Glasto this year, but I wasn't aware she released this album in February until it suddenly appeared in the charts at #23 in November this year - luckily it was one of those weeks I paid more attention than usual so spotted it and listened to it quite a few times, so I already know I like it.  But it never got a proper write-up, so let's fix that, shall we?

As I mentioned at the time, I was always going to like this because it's quite Marina-esque, but there's quite a bit more fiddling about with things than Marina does (her fine voice still shines through though).  High points for me are "Welcome To My Island", "Bunny Is A Rider", "Sunset" and "I Believe" - the album does calm down a bit somewhat after a strong start but I find it all pretty listenable, although I'm wasn't convinced by the school choir on "Billions".  I appreciate it won't be for everyone but if you like this sort of thing there's a lot to like here.

Wikipedia has quite a lot in the album's entry, but most of it has nothing to do with the album which is always annoying.  The critics were mostly pretty nice about it, although RipCord did ask the question "is there anything on this record that is really SO unique or special or different from every other competent art pop album out there?" which I suspect could be asked of every album out there. Unique/ special/ different is kinda hard to do these days - it's a case of putting all the well-used items together in an acceptable way and Caroline certainly does that for me here.  It did very well on the critics' year-end lists though and OK commercially as well - #23 in the UK, #87 in the US and top fifty in quite a few European countries.

"Customers also listened to" Charli XCX (yup, pretty similar), Kelala, Shygirl and Yves Tumor (all less similar).  I really liked this - particularly the first half where she gets some good bleepy noises combined with her strong voice.

#5/4 - One I wanted to like, and one I really did
#2 - A strange one