This album begins with a sizzle reel of what Caroline Polachek can do with her voice. Floating serenely on a high thermal of coos, it dips down in pitch and speeds towards the earth, cracking as Polachek pushes it into the red. She pulls up with a Celtic folk ululation and heads back into the sky again, higher than ever, reaching the whistle register of Mariah Carey and Ariana Grande. After a final soulful flourish, the drums kick in and she begins merely talking: “Welcome to my island.”
It is exhilarating to be hoisted in the air and carried on the back of pure talent like this. Pop today has a lot of really quite similar voices – either pained and earthy (men), or vocal-fried and arch (women) – making Polachek’s voice stand out all the more. On opener Welcome to My Island and throughout her fourth solo album, she’s technically immaculate, 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 the very topography of Polachek’s perfect voice.
