Caroline Polachek shared “The Gate [Extended Mix]” to mark the one-year anniversary of her debut solo album “Pang”. Released via Perpetual Novice, the new 10-minute version was mixed by Polachek and features contributions from Oneohtrix Point Never and Danny L Harle.
According to a press release, Polachek mixed the new track, which has “textural contributions” from Oneohtrix Point Never and Danny L Harle. “The Gate (Extended Mix)” also arrives with a music video by Ezra Miller.“In the original version of the song, the closing lyric (‘Finally, there’s a way/To be both free and safe’) are the words I’m waiting to hear, but never do,” Caroline Polachek said in a press release. “The extended version of the song then is a sort of parallel universe or alternate ending, where those words not only arrive, but ring true.”
Caroline Polachek has occupied many spaces during her decade as a musician. From fronting an indie band making sync-friendly earworms and contributing to Beyoncé albums to stints making experimental music under other aliases, she’s proved as malleable as she has been consistent, so the high quality of her debut solo LP “Pang” is unsurprising. Created alongside producer Danny L Harle, the album leans into the PC Music aesthetic, a sideways take on sugary pop melodies and electronic production. Unlike other artists on that roster, however, Polachek isn’t afraid to fully commit to her feelings; written after a painful break-up, Pang covers indecision (“Door”), lust (“So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings”), and self-doubt (“Caroline Shut Up”) in heart-swelling fashion.
Great albums often act as a key to how an artist moves forward, and Pang is proof that you’d back Polachek to go anywhere.
Caroline Polachek, formerly of the band Chairlift, has released her first record under her own name, “Pang”, following albums in 2016 and 2017 as Ramona Lisa and CEP. Singles, “Door,” “Parachute” and “Ocean of Tears,” take her elastic voice to new heights, leaning into an experimental-pop aesthetic with the help of PC Music producers A. G. Cook and Danny L Harle.
After a handful of pop songs in the past decade—think “Teenage Dream” or “Run Away With Me”—bottle the lightning feeling of whirlwind love perfectly, the sound of a saxophone horn or a vocal swell sublimating the yearning of a new romance. “Pang”, Caroline Polachek’s first solo album under her own name, stretches out that feeling, eking out the intricacies of feeling simultaneously liberated and trapped by the feeling of being overwhelmed by someone else. It’s a big task, but Polachek might be the ideal candidate, an indie darling who shaped her last band Chairlift’s pop origins into big-budget, emotional cinema to brilliant effect.
Polachek’s vision of pop is a sprawling bricolage that unifies and distorts Kate Bush’s singular baroque pop, PC’s poreless, glistening electronic experiments and an immense, nearly overwhelming spaciousness takes over Pang, which is intricately produced and layered with resplendent, noise and sound unspooling around Polachek, whose vocals, immaculate and exacting, are amplified and crushed by reverb and vocoder.
On Pang, the heart is an unexplored cavern begging to be mapped out and illuminated: Its gems, crevices and fault lines are on full display. At times, Pang is bogged down by the sheer volume of remorse in venturing toward Joni Mitchell’s Hejira. A spare marimba amplifies the melodrama of abandoning a just-fine, otherwise-stable commitment in the plaintive, acoustic waltz of “Look at Me Now.” She sings of feeling like “a butterfly trapped inside a plane” on trap-pop offering “Hit Me Where It Hurts.” Moments later on “I Give Up,” Polachek is leaden and weighed down with a partner who gives her a “list of things about myself to change.”
It’s a far cry from “New Normal,” itself a paean to a new spark, which skitters from country steel pedal to dembow to Mustard-esque vocal echoes, as if itself modulating in real time to adjust to the realm of possibilities that could take place that evening, that week, that year.
The most sublime moments on Pang match the all-cylinders feeling of falling into new love, each neuron so stimulated by the feeling that they threaten to overload and collapse entirely. The divine title track is, at once, twee and lustful, as if The Postal Service were tasked with making a quiet-storm track—the base feeling of unexplored love compounded with each touch of the skin.
Often, the bliss is tempered by Polachek’s neuroticism. The thirst of the immaculate “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings” is counteracted by the fear of being too obsessive: While she’s counting the days after her last encounter with a new fling and crying on the dancefloor while their song plays, she brushes it off with a “banana” non-sequitur. Elsewhere, such as on the robot doo-wop in “Caroline Shut Up” and on the harpsichord-meets-two-step of “Hey Big Eyes,” she’s too worried about tripping over herself as she navigates feeling too much with feeling nothing at all
By the end of Pang, Polachek has fully opened up to the headrush of new love—both in the chance that it could devastate, and the very real possibility that it could result in something transcendent. “The parachute, I’ve got to trust it now,” she sighs on album closer “Parachute,” her voice weightless, at ease.
Caroline Polachek (formerly of the band Chairlift) is releasing a new solo album, “Pang”, on October 18th via Columbia Records . This week she shared another song from the album, “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings.”
Previously Polachek shared three songs from Pang. “Ocean of Tears” and “Parachute” were shared when the album was announced, with “Ocean of Tears” making our Songs of the Week list in many blogging lists. Then she shared a video for “Ocean of Tears.” The album also includes the previously shared single “Door.”
For Pang Polachek has collaborated with producer/composer Danny L Harle. “Parachute” was the first song written for the album, with lyrics inspired by a dream Polachek had “in which she accepts her own death only to find herself saved,” as a press release puts it.
“It was an incredible moment, realizing that this melody we’d written was unintentionally re-telling a dream I’d been shaken by,” says Polachek in the press release. “I went home, re-drafted the words to fit, and came back to the studio at 1am to record the vocal the same day. And that’s the take we kept. From that moment on, Dan and I knew we had a lot more work to do together.”
Polachek adds: “‘Parachute’ is about the total trust that only comes with total emergency. Like a mayfly trying its wings for the first time over a large body of water full of hungry fish… and the wings work.”
“Ocean of Tears” was the last song written for the album. The song was written by Caroline Polachek, NateCampany, and Kyle Shearer and produced by Caroline Polachek, Danny L Harle, and Valley Girl, with additional production by A. G. Cook.
In the press release Polachek says, “‘Ocean of Tears’ is dedicated to the sharp pain of being in love with someone far away, and the maddening doubt that comes with it.”
She adds: “I’d really like someone to figure skate to this at the 2022 Winter Olympics.”
Pang will be Polachek’s first album released under her own name, although she did release, Arcadia, a solo album as Ramona Lisa, in 2014, as well as an instrumental Ramona Lisa album, Drawing the Target Around the Arrow in 2017. Chairlift announced in 2016 that they were splitting up and they played some final shows in 2017.
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