Desire, I Want to Turn Into You – Caroline Polachek ★★★

Year	Album	Artist	Stars	Score	Genre
2023	Desire, I Want To Turn Into You	Caroline Polachek	★★★	65	Pop	Indie Pop

I’ve always found Caroline Polachek a little too uninteresting to be a great indie artist, and not fun or dynamic enough to be a great pop artist. I feel like that still carries over to 2023’s Desire, I Want to Turn Into You. I don’t think her voice or lyrics really carry some of the lower-energy tracks, and the upbeat pop tracks feel a little too clean and flat for me production-wise to have that “it” factor I’m looking for. 

But, I do think Desire, I Want to Turn Into You is an improvement on what she produced on her 2019 record, Pang, and she shows maturity in her songwriting and a more fully-formed album overall.  Desire, I Want to Turn Into You is a set of solid tracks and is far more consistent in quality than a typical pop record, even if the high-end hits aren’t there for me. It’s pleasant pop music with very clean, mostly warm production. 

The opening track “Welcome To My Island” is a good, bouncy opener, even if it has some unnecessary, kind of annoying vocalizing. “Pretty In Possible,” “Sunset” and “Smoke” could all serve as ready-made pop radio singles of slightly varying styles. “Hopedrunk Everasking,” and “Crude Drawing of an Angel” are a bit too ethereal and dreamy to hold my attention, but sound pretty; “I Fly To You” featuring Dido and Grimes injects a little more energy into a similar styled song. 

Overall, I like all of it enough, but I don’t love any of it.