014/ Two new gateways into the wonderful world of Caroline Polachek
A quickie, to point you in the direction of two brilliant recent bits of telly performance by my favourite batshit art-pop iconoclast Caroline Polachek.
She seems to be doing a quick run of the USA promo circuit right now, after finishing the summer festival tour of her second solo album Desire, I Want to Fall Into You. And, given that Polachek’s output is up at the challenging, prog end of electro-pop (meaning that encountering her at random isn’t necessarily useful for winning over casuals) I feel as if these two particular performances are especially worth flagging.
First, last week Polachek did a Tiny Desk Concert, with an expanded seven-piece live acoustic band. Polachek’s full production stage show usually leans hard on the tech, perhaps too hard, which can take her sound right into pop’s uncanny valley of artificiality, onstage. But here, for once she keeps it natural, with lush results. It’s gorgeously arranged, sonic variety, delicate drumkit, thunky bass, just the right amount of backing vocal. Over four willowy songs, I’d say this is one of the best all-acoustic arrangements of electronic-based pop that I’ve heard. It’s especially ace to hear Polachek’s unique warbling, soaring, precise vocal, without loads of effects and digital layering and (whisper it) pitch correction and such. It’s not a voice for everyone, but I adore it — and by necessity it is gentler here, with less close mic’ing.
Secondly, in a razor-sharp swerve of contrast, Polachek went on The Late Show (the one with Stephen Colbert) to sing her new single ‘Dang’ and did this simple, yet profoundly batshit, zero budget PowerPoint-based solo performance. It works about as perfectly as any telly solo pop bit I’ve seen. No band, backing tape and voice, while simultaneously delivering an opaque keynote about god knows what. Conspiracy theory, self-help satire, pure eccentrica: I found myself going back over it, freeze-framing, trying to read the details on each increasingly daft slide. At one point she visually shows you where you’ve reached in the song. Best sexy TED Talk ever.
If you’ve not yet properly encountered Caroline Polachek, or only vaguely know her stuff (understandable, I suspect she’s far less well-known here in the UK than through most of Europe and Latin America) or maybe you’ve even been put off by what you’ve seen (for example, the BBC broadcast of her Glastonbury set wasn’t ideal first contact) I do think these examples are both fabulous entry points into her off-piste brain. My go-to comparison is always that Polachek dances on a golden kiss-off point between vintage Kate Bush and Charli XCX at her most stubborn and imaginative. Polachek has worked with Charli quite a bit. But even if that doesn’t sound like your jam, give these two performances a go. It won’t take long and she’s an artist with real, potent ideas, the courage to stick out, doesn’t mind coming at her music from a unique angle, and just overall, it’s super zingy shit.
Errors
A couple of people have mentioned they thought I was seriously angry in the weekend piece, about black vinyl versus coloured vinyl. This was not intended at all, I just adopted a tone aiming to be funny. Sorry about that.
Prior to that, I also made a couple of errors in the Stop Making Sense piece. I hit ‘publish’ when I meant to first email myself a review copy to check through (that’s what I usually do) then, too late, cursed my trigger finger.
I got the track name of a David Byrne solo song wrong, the Byrne solo songs played (from his soundtrack album The Catherine Wheel) are ‘What A Day That Was’ and Big ‘Business’.
Also, really fucking annoyingly, I misspelled the film The Manchurian Candidate.
In fact, I missed three sentences for that essay, which were still sitting in my ‘notes’ folder, waiting to be copied across — and would’ve pulled together my conclusions about the film more coherently, I reckon. Doesn’t matter now though! I think people who sum up Stop Making Sense as a concert that goes from ‘small’ to ‘big’ (or similar language) are over-simplifying. The ‘building the band’ section is not the focus of the whole, or even about getting bigger and bigger, per se. For a start, that section peaks too early on. Similarly, I don’t believe Byrne’s outsize suit is a continuation of the same idea. Surely, they’re all separate ideas and more meaningful than plain old scale.
By the way, I have seen one outstanding live gig that did achieve that feat of building from ‘small’ to ‘big’ through an entire show. It was James Yorkston & The Athletes doing a second headline set in a big tent, at one of the early Green Man festivals, perhaps 2004. Master folk-ish singer Yorkston started minuscule, acapella maybe, then gradually grew his solo thing into a band thing. Yes, like Stop Making Sense he brought on musicians one by one, but it was stretched out and felt more of a vividly, continuously, expanding process. It impacted song choice too. The climax, after a couple of all-out band songs that rocked the house, was to bring on Four Tet, who it turned out was already set up stage-left, and began to remix, live, the Athletes’ vast wigout to close their show. If I remember correctly, Four Tet then segued the end of their set smoothly into the opening of his own headline show. Mind you, I was very high, so apologies if this is an entirely imagined occurrence. It was a bewitching night but I’ve lost the authenticity of the visual memory, replicated and replicated in too much retelling. In my mind now, it all takes place in something that looks like the Bake Off tent, which can’t be right.