Caroline Polachek named her album Pang after the bursts of adrenaline that jolted her out of sleep. She describes this as an internal thing, the sudden shock of emotion that “pricks you emotionally from the inside.” But it’s corporeal, too; you can’t say the word “pang”—or sing it, as Polachek does on the title track—without a quick release of breath, somewhere between a gasp and a sigh.
Pang is Polachek’s first album under her own name (she released 2014’s Arcadia as Ramona Lisa, and 2017’s Drawing the Target Around the Arrow as her initials, CEP) and perhaps not coincidentally, this album centers on her vocals. The music doesn’t depart too far from her work in Chairlift: a little Tango in the Night sophistipop, a little ambient, and a little from the charts. Her usual lyrical themes recur: living unexpected dreams, getting away with something sneaky-fun, tears in public and in oceans. There’s also that familiar tension between the anonymity of the city and the pastoral, even suburban; on “Parachute,” Polachek sings about love as a force pulling her “back to strip malls, highways, and treetops.” The scope of Pang, however, is wider.
She produced much of the album with PC Music’s Danny L Harle, and massively tones down his fripperies. At times, there’s a new age or modern classical tinge to the arrangements. Sometimes Pang sounds so sweeping it’s almost symphonic; the first few notes of “The Gate” almost sound like a synthetic orchestra tuning up. It’s a PR cliché to tout artists’ “classical training,” which can mean anything from actual classical training to a semester of voice lessons in college, but in her work, you genuinely can hear it. She’s mentioned writing melodies as wordless stretches of singing—she calls it “applesaucing.” For most of the decade, she’s taken classical voice lessons, specifically in baroque singing. This comes out not just in the soaring, near-operatic vocalizations throughout Pang, but in the crisp way she attacks words and syllables, the controlled vocal leaps, and precise staccato.
Even more specifically, Polachek took up opera lessons after hearing the version of Handel’s “Lascia ch’io pianga” in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist. The non-traditional recording perhaps inspired her to use her training to non-traditional ends. Melodies that are heavily vocoded or Auto-Tuned often sound a little like a machine-made baroque run. As Polachek put it, “the voice just becomes the ultimate analog synth,” and it’s an effect she goes for a lot: the ornamentation throughout “Insomnia” and “Hey Big Eyes,” the digitally augmented glissando on the “Ocean of Tears” chorus, or the tumble of a vocal run, almost like a guitar solo, from the bridge of “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings.” The influence also filters into the instrumental at times, most clearly the harpsichord-esque notes that underpin “Hey Big Eyes.”
Pang is such a coherent musical statement that when something doesn’t fit, it stands out. Polachek restructured the album somewhat late, swapping out five songs; what’s left is a sweeping, delicately latticed album with a few odd pop songs. They’re not bad pop songs. “New Normal” matches quick-cut lyrical scenes with a chameleonic arrangement: Polachek’s melody is yanked between two keys, and the instrumental goes from a conspicuously yeehaw opening of slide guitar to an almost dancehall beat to sputtering percussion and vocal clips from hip-hop. Somehow, it all works, but it belongs to an entirely different record. The Andrew Wyatt co-write “Hit Me Where It Hurts” feels like it was intended for Charli XCX—the low, throaty, near-spoken verses are drastically unlike Polachek’s vocal arrangements throughout Pang, but very much something Charli might handle.
What those five new songs—“The Gate,” “Pang,” “Ocean of Tears,” “Caroline Shut Up,” and “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings”—do have in common is that they’re all love songs about the moment of surrender, the pain preceding it, and the euphoria after. These are something Polachek’s said she’s hesitant to write. Whether this is true—after all, this is the singer of “I Belong In Your Arms” and “Crying in Public,” two of the decade’s most unabashed love songs—one still detects a certain wryness on Pang. “Caroline Shut Up” is the record’s most swooning track, a waltz-tempo love ballad. The title is what she shouts at herself, an exasperated reminder to stop overthinking lest she ruin the moment. She gets punchy and self-mocking in “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings.” The arrangement is ’80s, somewhere between “Every Breath You Take” and “Everywhere,” but the scene is ’10s: crying in public over the Snaps you’re getting from your long-distance partner, culminating in the goofy-horny “show me the banana.” The chorus is punctuated, louder each time, with a gasp: the sound of a crush so sudden you feel like running out of the room, or bursting into a grin and never stopping. After all, laughter is a pang too.
