Caroline Polachek is back with new music, the first since her February album Desire, I Want To Turn Into You, and a recent performance of the new song “Dang” came complete with an educational PowerPoint presentation.
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Polachek performed on The Late Show while host Stephen Colbert broadcasted from home with COVID-19, and she staged the live performance as a sort of TED Talk presentation, complete with a projector and slide clicker. She integrated smart dance moves into the presentation as well, hitting beats and switching slides at the same time. It would take a while to interpret every aspect of her slideshow, but the majority of the imagery is existential, introspective, or aesthetic.
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The new song is mostly comprised of sharp, staccato sounds and the word “dang,” but there’s also a softness that comes through all of Polachek’s vocals. She possesses a voice like a satin pillowcase and words seem to simply slip from it.
She possessed that ethereal quality recently while performing on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert series, where she presented stripped-down renditions of “Sunset,” “Blood and Butter,” “Pretty In Possible,” and “I Believe” off of Desire. The scaled-down accompaniments didn’t limit Polachek, though, who took the opportunity to show off her warbly voice by perfectly hitting the octaves on “Sunset” and the others. It’s clear that she still has the chops she did during her Chairlift days, and her solo work has both a familiar yet altogether novel sound.
In October of last year, Polachek released the aria she wrote for the Kurt Cobain opera Last Days, which was based on the 2005 film and followed Cobain’s final five days between in 1994. The aria was titled “Non Voglio Mai Vedere Il Sole Tramontare” (I Never Want to See the Sun Go Down), and the opera ran until October 11, 2022, in London. That project came on the back of Polachek’s February 2022 single “Billions,” which was then featured on Desire, I Want To Turn Into You.
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