On the first anniversary of the stirring Desire, I Want To Turn Into You, Caroline Polachek dropped an updated “Everasking Edition.” The deluxe album comes complete with an impressive 19 songs, including seven new additions. Across the Everasking Edition’s staggering hour and 13-minute runtime, each track packs the power and prose unique to Caroline Polachek.
Pop Perfection
The 2023 release of Desire is pop perfection. Polachek’s enthralling voice weaves with ease through each track, grabbing listeners and refusing to let go. From the ethereal opening notes of “Welcome To My Island,” Polachek crafts another world of sound that shatters any notion of normal. She smoothly slips elements of trip-hop, gospel, electronica and rock into the album with total charge. Her highly experimental, oftentimes futuristic, sound cemented Desire as a seemingly untouchable, perfectly polished masterwork. But with this year’s re-release, the American singer worked her magic to make the impossible possible. The Everasking Edition of Desire pushes the album to even greater heights.
Flying High
“Dang” is a particularly incredible addition to Desire‘s expansion. The track crunches and booms with a metallic punch that sounds completely alien. As each bouncing beat explodes with life, Polachek floats between a cool, distant drone and flat-out screams. Her performance of the track on The Late Show captures how violently Caroline Polachek breaks down the rigid walls of pop.
Unexpected textures continue to pepper the updated latter half of the album, with “Coma” in particular leading listeners in new directions. Polachek takes turn after turn, never slowing down across the track’s bumbling beat. Her heavenly voice spills across unrelenting drums, which then give way to enrapturing strings and synth on “Gambler’s Prayer.” Groovy bass lines and Polachek’s breathy whispers mingle with whistles and harps that bring the album ever closer to its end. The album is punctuated with a stripped-down version of “I Believe.” The acoustic soundscape gives Polachek’s voice even more room to shine, just as it does on the celestial “Butterfly Net” and “Spring Is Coming With A Strawberry In The Mouth.” Each addition to the album proves her genius as a songwriter, capturing how the shifts in her sound. She goes beyond simple evolution and into wickedly entrancing mutation.
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