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.”