TRACK REVIEW: Caroline Polachek - Billions

TRACK REVIEW:

Caroline Polachek

PHOTO CREDIT: Nedda Afsari

Billions

9.6/10

The track, Billions, is available from:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zEQJrggKgk

RELEASE DATE:

9th February, 2022

ORIGIN:

New York, U.S.A.

GENRE:

Alternative Pop

LABEL:

Perpetual Novice

__________

FOR this review…

PHOTO CREDIT: Hugo Comte

I am spending some time with one of my favourite artists of the moment. I last reviewed Caroline Polachek when her track, Insomnia, came out in 2019. With the release of her latest album, Pang (2019), we received a wonderful album from a truly compelling artist. I am going to come to her latest single. I am not sure whether there is an album planned for this year. The New York-born artist is one of the most interesting and talented in the world. Everything she puts out leaves a lingering impression. I will come to her new track, Billions, in a minute (she actually released the audio for Long Road Home yesterday, but I might cover that another time). Before that, I want to work my way to it. I will start out with a little bit about her background. I shall come to a more fulsome exploration of her background soon. Prior to that, Harper’s BAZAAR chatted with Polachek a couple of years ago. It is amazing reading about her previous life (in terms of her non-songwriting past) and where she has come from:

“In the early 2000s, Caroline was still pursuing degrees in biology and classical voice.

"I thought I wanted to go to school for either biology or classical voice and I could not decide which one, so I went to the University of Colorado, the only school in America that has great bio and opera departments. And as soon as I got there I realized I didn’t want to study either, and I wanted to study art, but the art department was terrible. I got straight As for two years, 4.2 GPA, and started from scratch at NYU.

"Chairlift started when I was at University of Colorado. Chairlift came with me when I went to New York. When I got accepted to art school, Aaron [Pfenning, Polachek’s Chairlift bandmate] dropped out of school and came with me."

She’s working with the same operatic voice coach she had when she was 14 years old.

"When I was in high school, I was obsessed with singing. I was in seven music groups at one point, and I was also auditioning for these state choirs. And these auditions, totally counter-intuitively, weren’t choral-style singing, they were opera. It made no sense, but you’d still have to prepare these arias, so I found a recommendation for a voice teacher who could help me. And I worked with this amazing woman named Pamela Kuhn, who had a much more radical approach than any of the choir teachers I had worked with up until that point.

"Fast forward 12 years, Chairlift is in the process of making our final record Moth, and there are these songs that are really pushing me and my high register like ‘Ch-Ching,’ where I’m belting and that’s not what my voice is built for. So, I realize while I’m in the studio that if I take these songs on tour, I'm risking permanently damaging my voice.

"I’m like, ‘I still have my voice teacher’s number on my phone from when I was 14, let’s see if she still has my number.’ I called her up and I’ve been working with her again ever since. She’s become a personal mentor, kind of a godmother figure for me."

PHOTO CREDIT: Lindsay Ellary

After stripping her previous acts and stage names—Chairlift, Ramona Lisa, and CEP—Pang is more “her” than anything else Polachek has ever made.

"I think it’s a fusion of a lot of different things that I’m interested in, and have always been interested in, but have kind of compartmentalized in the past. I think with Chairlift there was always this soulfulness and playfulness, especially in the sonics, but with RamonaLisa, I really got to flex more on my formalist, romantic side. And with CEP, I just got to be a complete synth-nerd and create a framework for that kind of exploration of sonics. Now, I’m doing all those things in the same ball pit”.

Fashion and music helped build her identity.

"What you put on during the day has so much to do with emotional survival—like how you can keep yourself spiritually intact and go about your day and create an identity for yourself. I feel like music does that for people as well, like ‘Who am I in the world? What are my values? What’s my thing? What’s my scene? Who are my people?’

"Both fashion and music, especially as a teenager, helped give me so much meaning in life, and sense of identity, and what kind of adult I want to turn into, and what I cared about in the world. I think things like fine art and cinema maybe don’t have as much to do with that, but are operating on potentially more important levels. It’s about creating identities”.

There is a lot more to explore when it comes to Caroline Polachek. The former Charlift member has forged this amazing solo career. The New Yorker profiled and interviewed Polachek last year. Their feature focused on her returning to gigs after a year or more away. I discovered more about where Polachek was born and her family history;

“Polachek was born in Manhattan, but she spent her early childhood in Tokyo, where her parents, both of them ex-academics, managed investment portfolios. Her favorite TV show, “Creamy Mami, the Magic Angel,” was about a girl who turned into a pop star after being granted powers by an alien. She resisted music lessons, but could play songs on the piano by ear. Her father was a classical pianist and violinist, and to keep his daughter’s sonic experiments from becoming disruptive he bought her a Yamaha keyboard for her room. When she was seven, her family moved to Greenwich, Connecticut, and Polachek, a loner until late adolescence, became a horse girl. She credits riding with teaching her about rhythm and how to map space—to her instructor’s chagrin, she would mentally subdivide the beats of her horse’s gait and beatbox along in the saddle. “You learn to steer with your eyesight,” she said. “Wherever you look, your body weight shifts to match, and the horse matches. I feel like that’s a skill I still have in terms of how I navigate the stage and hold myself—leading with my eyes.”

Her father struggled with bipolar disorder and depression, and he distanced himself from the family. Polachek’s parents divorced soon after the move back to the States. “Even when I was a kid, there were years that would go by without me talking to him,” she told me. But, when she was an adult, they rebuilt their relationship, and after he got sick she talked to him on the phone about his symptoms, trying to encourage him by telling him about her recovery. By late April, it was clear that he wasn’t going to make it. “Saying goodbye to him over FaceTime was one of the most painful experiences of my life,” she said. “And I just really didn’t want to leave the house for a long time after that.” A couple of months after her father’s death, she wrote a tribute to him on Instagram, describing him as “a lightning wit, and a better musician than I can ever hope to be.” Her father, who had been a scholar of the Qing dynasty and taught at Princeton and Columbia, had “hated pop music and never once came to see me perform,” she wrote, “but his belief in the arts as a secret language for transcendent beauty, radical politics, and syncretic spirituality bolstered my faith in making music.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Damon Casarez for The New Yorker

Polachek began looking for people to sing with when she was fifteen, and ended up in two nu-metal bands, four choirs—one at church and three at school—and an a-cappella group. In 2004, she enrolled at the University of Colorado, where she met Aaron Pfenning, another student and musician. The two started dating, and formed Chairlift. They moved to Brooklyn in 2006; there, they joined up with the producer Patrick Wimberly, and Chairlift became a trio. Polachek worked toward a B.F.A. at N.Y.U. while the band played warehouse shows and put music up on MySpace, selling burned CDs for a dollar. Her mother had made it clear that she would be cut off financially after graduation, and Polachek was too pragmatic and too proud, she told me, to depend on her parents as an adult. She hoped to get a job as a gallery girl, to “eat shit and slowly make my way into the art world,” she said. She was also making art. One of her projects, “The Gothletic Archetype,” which involved reworked photos of teen-age volleyball players, had just been accepted for a group show when a producer at KCRW, in Santa Monica, played a demo of the Chairlift song “Bruises” on the air. Apple soon bought the rights to play it in a commercial for the iPod Nano. Chairlift was signed by Columbia.

PHOTO CREDIT: Tsarini Merrin

“It was a blessing, but it was a curse,” Polachek told me, of the Apple spot. The band was instantly more popular, but people wanted to hear songs that sounded like the one from the ad. Pfenning and Polachek broke up, and he left the band. Polachek kept writing songs, which Wimberly produced, but she was frustrated by the constraints of this arrangement. “I became more micromanagey,” she told me. “I think I started to resent the fact that I didn’t have my hands on the wheel, that I had to go through a boy. There was a side of me that didn’t really play into the idea of a band, that was more electronically-minded, and wanted to play more with the idea of theatre and costume than I felt able to do when surrounded by unshaved guys onstage.”

She recorded an album entirely on her laptop, on her own, and released it, in 2014, under the name Ramona Lisa, an old Facebook alias. The songs had seraphic melodies that melted into discordant static; she called the genre “electronic pastoral.” She had begun dating Ian Drennan, another artist and musician, and they were married in 2015, at the New York Chinese Scholar’s Garden, on Staten Island. Vogue did a photo spread of the ceremony: the gardens were deep emerald, and the table arrangements were studded with persimmons. Pamela Kuhn, Polachek’s opera teacher, officiated”.

PHOTO CREDIT: 91 Rules

I cannot talk about Caroline Polachek without mentioning her fantastic album, Pang. It is definitely one of the best albums of 2019 and one that ranks alongside her very best work. I want to introduce a 2020 interview from i-D. Polachek was based in London at the time. In addition to discussing the writing and creation of the album, we also had described the atmosphere and average day-to-day of living in the city:

“If you wanna create a moment of relief in a song, you have to create something that’s gonna disappear.” A car alarm has been going off outside the window where Caroline Polachek and I are sitting in London with tea and an attention-seeking whippet for about five minutes now. It stops. The sudden silence reminds her of a technique one of her collaborators, producer Dan Carey, uses. “He’ll add this really subliminal track of white noise that builds and builds and then you just take it away. And you can’t tell what just happened but it’s like when that alarm stopped; it just creates this calm.” I ask whether she’s implemented this in her own work. “Me? Relief? That’s not my genre,” she laughs. “I’m all angst!”

After 11 years and three albums at the helm of Brooklyn synth-pop band Chairlift — plus a handful of releases under solo side projects Ramona Lisa and CEP — at the end of 2019, the classically trained musician released an album in her own name for the very first time. This is the most her her music has ever felt, she says. “There are aspects of my personality and my taste that I got to live out in other projects, even in collaborations, but this fuses all of those impulses together.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Ian Kenneth Bird

The critically acclaimed Pang beautifully explores apathy, taking risks and letting love change the course of your life. It was named after the intense feelings experienced at the time of writing it, feelings that she describes as so much deeper than anxiety. “I was having adrenaline surges that were actually really unpleasant. I was unable to sleep, I lost my appetite, dropped a bunch of weight and was constantly wired.”

When it landed last summer, lead single “Door” blew minds and set the tone with a surreal kaleidoscopic video of Caroline flanked by two greyhounds, the album’s spirit animal. “I’ve always been very attracted to how earnest and beautiful and nervous they are,” Caroline says, looking to the sighthound in the room. “When the album was coming together, it kind of hit me that a greyhound embodies that: it looks like how adrenalin feels. They’re kind of the embodiment of the flight or fight response, and their sharp linear quality felt so synced up with the melodies and the textures and the intention of the album.” It’s a novel thing, to assign a spirit animal to a body of music, but it’s something that Caroline almost always does — Chairlift’s last album was called Moth, and Ramona Lisa’s Arcadia used cicada imagery and sounds throughout. “I thought it was this romantic idea,” she remembers. “Being buried underground for seven years, then you come out and have one summer to find your mate and die. I was just so obsessed with the gothic romanticism of that lifecycle.”

PHOTO CREDIT: 91 Rules

Caroline describes her vision for Pang as “expressionist storybook goth”. At first glance, a mythical fantasy world; look a little closer and you’ll find something deeper than that. “I’ve forever been a fan of surrealism and the way that psychology and mental states got turned into landscapes, objects and situations,” she says. “Particularly by the female surrealists, who were so overlooked... artists like Dorothea Tanning, Kay Sage and Leonora Carrington. Dali and Magritte get all the hype!” The album’s three music videos, which Caroline co-directed with her artist boyfriend Matt Copson, who — when not accidentally quarantined in London — she lives with in Los Angeles, embrace this fully.

“At that time I felt so polarised: I felt like there was my inner world and then there was my lived experience which was, like, me in a sweatshirt in a studio, which is not what the music felt like. The music was coming from this other place.” And so they created it. First there was “Door”, with the aforementioned greyhounds, yes, but also an infinity mirror, an endless corridor of doors and a swirling wormhole hanging outside her bedroom window. Then came the “Ocean of Tears” surrounding Caroline’s pirate ship. Forewarning that “this is gonna be torture” in the opening line, she feels the distance as she looks to her beloved through a telescope from up in the crow’s nest, the wordless chorus a siren call. Finally there was “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings”, in which a cowboy-booted and school skirt-suited Caroline line-dances through the fire pits of hell”.

Pang made such a big impression. There is no doubting the fact the album was crafted by a real genius and visionary. With songs that seemingly came from a higher place, there was a lot of attention around Polachek following the album’s release. Her third studio album – her debut under her given name -, make sure you check out Pang if you have not heard it already. DOCUMENT spoke with Polachek in 2020. Aside from discovering more about the album, they also observe what Polachek is like as an interviewee:

“There is something magical about Caroline Polachek: a not-quite-of-this-world quality that anyone familiar with her work would first attribute to her voice, a remarkable instrument that is epic and ethereal and elegant, like a cathedral underwater. After 12 years as one half of the beloved indie-pop duo Chairlift—during which she also released two solo projects under the monikers Ramona Lisa and CEP—she came bursting out of the gate with Pang, her debut record under her own name. As a text, Pang is beautifully intense and kind of mind-blowing as Polachek’s introspection toggles between the familiar and banal—“Back in the city, I’m just another girl in a sweater,” she reflects on “Door”—to the idiosyncratic: “I’m feeling like a butterfly trapped inside a plane, maybe there’s something going on, I’m not insane,” she considers, haunted, on “Hit Me Where it Hurts.” Pang is raw and confessional, and it’s only part of what Polachek has to offer. “I think about vulnerability… that felt like a new level of openness,” she says, ruminating on the past year since the album’s release. “In a funny way I kind of find myself pushing back against that right now. Not in terms of being reactionary, and wanting to be opaque. But more like wanting to jump into total abstraction and nonsense as a kind of coping mechanism. Maybe more of a reflection of life.”

In conversation, Polachek is so much more than a bleeding heart. Her observations are suffused with wry, almost synaesthetic parlance; I’m reminded of her episode of Genius’ “Verified,” where she describes “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings”—arguably Pang’s most accessible, dance-floor ready track—as “a sneeze” for how quickly it came out of her. Her comic timing is dead-on, and she keeps making me laugh even when I don’t think she’s necessarily trying to be funny. Above all else, I feel a prescience when I talk to Polachek that is totally sensical: it’s part of that same magic that she has built from the ground up, immersed in the electricity of her visual and aural worlds.

From the long-distance desire of “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings” to the Sisyphean rotation of “Door,” Pang is the quintessential quarantine album, although it was released last October. There is even a song called “The New Normal” that recalls minute quotidian details as the seasons pass: “It’s house arrest, no stopping for dinner,” she clairvoyantly notes at one point. Fans and critics see Pang as a perfect and complete record, but for Polachek the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in some unfinished business with the work. “There’s a lot I wanted to do that I didn’t get to do,” she says. “I was still quite inspired by a lot of the challenges and ideas that that album laid out.” In lieu of planned projects, she released an extended mix of opening track “The Gate,” a textural and cyclical revision that she sees as a “parallel universe or alternate ending” to the original song”.

One thing that many people do not discuss when they think of Caroline Polachek is her as a producer. She was one of the producers on Pang - and she is a producer with a great strength and sense of what she wants to achieve. BRICKS spoke with Polachek at the start of last year. They were keen to ask her about production:

“I think your audience is only starting to realise and appreciate your role as a producer. Do you find that working – or specifically interacting with a computer – changes how you think about music and songwriting?

Yeah, absolutely. I’m such a linear songwriter, so I tend to stay in the “left to right” mode of Ableton rather than breaking it into the interchangeable modular loops which is a more classic electronic way of working. But that makes sense given that I was a songwriter first.

The longer I spend straddling the producer/vocalist/writer hybrid, the more it all gels into one, to the point that I have to be careful if I’m writing songs in front of the computer because I’ll start modifying my voice as I’m writing – using effects as a writing tool. I’m sometimes paranoid about that process slowing down the writing, or watering it down. Not that it has, per se… probably just my own paranoia.

I think that paranoia is really valid. You were saying you were writing songs way before you were doing what you would consider production – I assume you were still using a computer in some sense, right? Did you self-record before you self-produced?

The first instance of that was I had this Yamaha PSR that had six song banks that you could work in, and within those song banks, you had six layers. So, I learned I could have six songs recorded at any given time, but if I wanted to make a seventh song, I’d have to delete one or record it onto my secret tape cassette recorder. That put me in a very ephemeral mindset, where the final form is on a dead-end cassette tape that no one else hears.

For me, that is production, right? Even before you were interfacing with something like Ableton or Logic, you already had this limitation where you were doing these tracklists, and then it resulted in what you call the ‘secret tape’. Sort of exec-producing your own early songwriting, just because of the technology.

Absolutely. If I was thirteen years old now doing that those songs would be online in some form, which I would infinitely regret ten years later! Having a private place to learn is really important”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Vasso Vu

There is new music brewing. The fact that she has put two songs out in close succession (Long Road Home came out a couple of days or so after Billions, and one suspects a music video will appear at some point), I am not sure when her next album is coming, through it is likely to be very soon. Caroline Polachek spoke with METAL after the release of her last single, Bunny Is a Rider:

“When you’re talking about writing your new music and how it’s moving away from words, what is that sounding like?

I always tend to write non-lyrically. At least at first, even songs of mine that are the most on the nose like So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings. That song started with a melodic motif – a synth and keyboard motif – and then everything got written over and then spliced together. I realised that a lot of songwriters are the opposite – they’ll start with a text – but, for me, it’s always either groove, structure or melody, and then words are the last thing. So, in that sense, the stage three of the song-making process has changed, not stage one and two. I guess what it means is that I’m more curious about pursuing the mood in its own right rather than the mood as it relates to external events.

What do you mean by that?

For example, when I write lyrics, it usually feels like decoding, a little bit – like I’m listening to what the melody is already expressing and then I try and put words to that expression. On my last album, I did a lot of very personal work because there was so much going on in my life that I wanted to talk about, but I was very rarely showing up in the studio with the bravery to talk about these things. So, I would write melodically and then listen and say, okay, well, this song is very clearly very sad. What can this be about? And then, well, actually, this was going on and this is very sad. So, obviously, this is where the song came from. It’s like a detective process, but this time around I’m more interested in describing the moods themselves rather than linking them back to ontological events.

Does lyricism still exist at all within what you’ve created? How are you mapping out any sort of words or lyrics when you’re writing these new songs?

It absolutely exists. It’s just looser, more playful and abstract. And this is a mode of writing that I’ve gone in and out of my whole career. There’s a song called Amanaemonesia that I did with my former band called Chairlift which is, completely, free association, but still has a very strong character. And then, Bunny Is A Rider is a song I did just a few months ago now, and that song follows the same methodology as well”.

PHOTO CREDIT: 91 Rules

Just before moving on to Billions, I want to bring in an interview that looked at Polachek back on the road and touring whilst there is still a pandemic on. Although it is a strange time still, there is a sense of relief that things are beginning to return to ‘normal’. The Current asked Polachek about her recordings during the pandemic and being back on the road:

“Now Polachek, who first made a splash as the leader of Chairlift, is currently on the road on her Heart is Unbreaking tour. She stops at First Avenue on Tuesday, December 7. Here are highlights of her conversation with New Hot host David Safar.

DAVID SAFAR: Let's get started by talking about things we've done during the pandemic, and Caroline, something that you've done that caught my ear is this cover of the Corrs’ "Breathless." Can you tell us about what inspired you to put this one out?

CAROLINE POLACHEK: "Breathless" has been a favorite song of mine since I was little. It came out in the late ‘90s and I remember being a kid in the back of my mom's car looking out the window and listening to these sisters singing. They were doing this really cool vocal flipping technique, which is so idiomatic to English and Scottish folk singing, and that kind of style ended up having a big influence on me later. That song is just so cleverly written because there's actually a sneaky change in each one of the choruses and verse transitions. It's just so well written that you can't even tell. And it just has this kind of windswept sweetness to it that I just love so much.

PHOTO CREDIT: 91 Rules

I was playing with Charli XCX at her afterparty for her New York Pop 2 show, and Danny L Harle was DJing and I had this idea. [I asked], “Can you do a cover of ‘Breathless’ during your DJ set for Charli's afterparty?” So, we spent about two hours, I got the karaoke midi of "Breathless” online and we arranged out a super simple version in about two hours. I performed it at night, and people were absolutely mental. I was like, “This has to get added to the Pang live show.” We toured it a little bit, and then during the pandemic [...] it kind of was a reminder for me of being back on stage and being at parties. So we did it as a nostalgic act and it was really fun.

I love that story. The other thing you did during the pandemic was you re-recorded "So Hot You're Hurting My Feelings," a new version called "So Cold.” How did that come about?

That was all A. G. Cook. He did an incredible series of live streams of parties and events, and for the PC Music Pop Carol Party he was like, “Look, this is about as pop carol as we can get, why don't we do a Christmas edit of ‘So Hot You're Hurting My Feelings.’" He wrote a lot of his lyric changes, including the great line, “don't send me presents” instead of “don't send me photos,” because “you're so cold, you're hurting my feelings.” Funny story about that version, he did my afterparty in London a few weeks ago, and at the peak dancefloor moment of the after party he slammed on the Christmas remix of that song. At a couple shows following that, I've accidentally sung the Christmas lyrics on stage instead of the real lyrics. Which has been extremely embarrassing, but you know, I guess we're all getting into the holiday spirit right now.

You're out on the road right now, and you're coming to Minneapolis. What's it been like getting back on stage?

It's been surreal. I mean, I feel so lucky to be able to talk right now. I think it's still so many people's first shows back out. And, you know, I feel very grateful to say that a lot of my listeners really connected with my music during the pandemic. So we're having a very emotional response to it live right now, and I don't take any of this for granted. It's been very emotional for me as well”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Damon Casarez for The New Yorker

It is time to get to the song. Billions is another great track from Caroline Polachek. Different to Bunny Is a Rider, it definitely hints at a slightly different sonic and lyrical direction than Pang. One of the things about Polachek’s songs is her delivery. Listen to tracs like Bunny Is a Rider and how short the lines were. Punchier and shorter, it is about the vocal delivery. Billions is similar, in the sense the lines are quite short; Polachek’s presentation and singing adds so many other layers, words and emotions. Before getting to the first verse, it is worth talking about the introduction and video. The intro has percussive pulses, what sounds like tape being rewound quickly, and some slightly far-off heavenly vocals. It is an atmospheric and intriguing introduction that instantly gets into your head. In the video, Polachek is seen picking berries and bunches of berries from vine. Dressed in a baseball cap and an all-white outfit (complete with glamorous jewellery), you will definitely be hooked by the visuals. Polachek looks seductive and beautiful, yet there is something almost mythical and biblical about the scenes and storyline. Whereas Bunny Is a Rider has slightly lower vocals that were quite quickly delivered (they had a definitely sense of punctuation and urgency), there is something breathier and higher-pitched here: “Psycho, priceless/Good in a crisis/Working the angles/Oh, billions/Sexting sonnets/Under the tables/Tangled in cables/Oh, billions/Salty (Ah), flavor (Ah)/Lies like a sailor/But he loves like a painter/Oh, billions”. Whether the song is about wealth and a sense of entitlement and deceit, I am not too sure.

PHOTO CREDIT: Aidan Zamiri

Polachek has always been a wonderful lyricist who creates her own world. The chorus is simple but delivered with passion: “Ah, ah/Say, say, say, say something to me/Ah, ah/Say, say, say, say something to me”. Whereas the first verse was slower and more sensual, the second verse sees the video change from the vines and this setting to the heroine in the bath. What looks like a bath of milk, we see a sink and towels nearby in this interesting set. With her vocals reminding me a bit of Christine and the Queens’ Héloïse Letissier (especially when she sings “billions” in the background), the second verse has a slightly heavier and tauter vocal. In the sense that it is less breathy and romantic than the first verse. It has a harder edge. That is appropriate given the set change and Polachek writhing and moving in the bath. Again, the lyrics of the verse contain short lines and vivid images. With no real inspiration and particular person in mind, what we have are these visions tied together that each listener will get something different from: “Headless angel/Body upgraded/But it's dead on arrival/Oh, billions/Twisted, manic/Cornucopia/Yeah, my cup overfloweth/Oh, billions”. Upcoming from her sophomore album (which we do not have a date for yet), Polachek has played Billions live. I can imagine her having a very eye-catching setting for this number, suggested by the video. The pre-chorus is interesting: “Hand it over (Ah), broker (Ah)/Give me the closure/He's a pearl, I'm the oyster/Oh, billions”. In the video, with this innocent and sense of the spiritual and saintly as she wears white, she can be seen moving around glasses. Drinking vessels that she picks up and there seems to be the sense of attachment to – whether she sees herself as fragile as glass or connects with them in some way -, Polachek seems lost in her visions.

PHOTO CREDIT: Lindsay Ellary

It is a beautiful video that was directed and edited by Caroline Polachek & Matt Copson. Polachek definitely has a real talent as a director and visual artist! Before the song closes, we see Polachek dressed now in black and looking both dignified and almost widow-like, but also very alluring. She turns the pages of a book. The light changes from a whiter and lighter tone to reds and blacks. It is a change that is welcomed by the Trinity Croydon Choir. One of the busiest and most successful boys' choirs in the world, it is an inspired choice to end the song! They repeat the line “Oh, I never felt so close to you”. It is a beautiful, almost haunting and divine way to end a song that has moved through different stages and worlds. Billions started with a composition and sound that reminded me of Björk’s work in the ‘90s. Polachek, in the video, is almost a biblical figure or temptress. It moves to the bathroom and a sense of temptation. I wonder whether picking berries was like being in the Garden of Eden; her in a bath of milkier water had religious semblance and symbolism? Almost a maid or some historic figure at the end, I love the rich imagery and the colours. It is beautifully shot and edited so that we get this feast of contours, wonderfully nuanced images and an almost filmic representation of this Caroline Polachek song. I cannot wait to see what more comes from her forthcoming sophomore album. Polachek is an artist in her own league that has a distinct and fantastic sound. If you have not heard her music or are new to it, then listen back and see what bounty she has to offer. She is an artist that we…