Friday Female Singers

Trousdale, Caroline Polachek reviewed

to the windows, to the walls

Is the world ready for another Kate Bush? Arguably, it wasn’t ready for the first one; as I noted in a recent piece for the Washington Examiner, it took almost thirty-seven years for “Running Up That Hill” to reach #1 on the charts, dragged there by X-er nostalgia TV show Stranger Things. It would be difficult to overstate the amount of raw talent Bush possessed, and still possesses; her debut album, The Kick Inside, was mostly written in her mid-teens but even at fifty-one I occasionally feel that I am not quite grown-up enough to understand it. She appears to have been born with a complete grasp of everything from digital sampling to bloodlust to Victorian romance to four octaves of vocal range to incest pornography; you can find all of the above, and more, on her first two albums.

Caroline Polachek, by contrast, did not fully arrive into her powers until her early thirties, when she recorded Pang. Prior to that, she was best-known for being the less talented half of Chairlift, the less successful of two university bands formed in the first decade of this century for the purpose of creating horror film soundtracks. (Millennials will get no bonus points for remembering the other one, which is still known by the name of its proposed film — “Vampire Weekend”.)

If Pang was like the eponymous Led Zeppelin album, which is to say remarkable but not legendary, then her newly released effort, pretentiously but evocatively titled Desire, I Want To Turn Into You, has the self-assured and monstrously accomplished impact of Led Zeppelin II. Here Polachek plays the roles of both Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, providing the thunderous vocals and the razor-precise arranging. The parallels don’t stop there. Like Planty, she is absolutely infatuated with a sort of theatricality that wouldn’t have been out of place in “The Battle Of Evermore”, but like Pagey she has clearly put an intense amount of thought into every single picosecond of her recording. Perhaps too much.

She is also a brilliant visual artist; the video for “Welcome To My Island” is composed of individual vignettes referring to each track on the album. You’d need fifty views to figure it all out.

The track itself opens with an explicit vocal nod to Kate Bush before getting into the serious business of electronica-pop. This is not Lenny Kravitz shamelessly imitating Jimi Hendrix down to the feathers; more like Saul “Slash” Hudson double-timing a Bo Diddley riff to create “Mr. Brownstone”.

Never conventionally pretty or voluptuous, Polachek is nonetheless obsessed with sexuality and the magnetic tug of wanting. Her video for “Billions” and her promotional tour material both shamelessly focus on the top half of her intergluteal cleft, a sly nod to both our current societal obsession with ass as the universal input for a gender-ambiguous climate and the indecent but thrilled sense of pleasure women often take from outright sodomy as they enter middle age.

About half of the record was released in dribs and drabs over the past year, reflecting the unfortunate fact that Spotify and Apple Music have basically destroyed album-oriented rock in favor of a payment model that favors obsessive listening to a single track, but Polachek saved some of her biggest hitters for the complete album release. She is not afraid to play with death; one track refers to the Sophie Xeon, the transgender producer who died in a falling incident similar to the one that killed “Trouble T-Roy” thirty-five years ago, while another refers to a re-stylized conversation held with her father right before his recent death:

He says, "Watch your ego, watch your head, girl
You're so smart, so talented
But now the water's turning red
And it's all your fault and it's all your mess
And you're all alone and can't go to bed
Too high on your adrenaline
You gotta go somewhere where you can't pretend
Go forget the rules, forget your friends
Just you and your reflection
'Cause nothing's gonna be the same again
No, nothing's gonna be the same again"

Polachek’s father was a professor and financier who refused to see her perform live, derisively noting that her music was, in her words, “too pop and too commercial, and therefore less authentic because it wasn’t insurrectionist or radical enough.” So, a nice combination of “The Dude” from The Big Lebowski and Joan Crawford, then. Also, he was a musical idiot. Excellence in artistic performance has always been insurrectionist and/or radical, because there is no room for it in everyday life. This is as true of the Sistine Chapel as it was of A Love Supreme. You don’t turn thirty-seven and make a record like unless something inside you absolutely compels you to do it.

I personally find Desire, I Want To Turn Into You absolutely thrilling because it suggests the vitality of artistic potential in the age of: Auto-Tune, ProTools, generic MIDI keyboards commanding an infinity of slightly incompetent digital patches. All of this is in full flower on the album, yet it manages to be utterly brilliant. It reminds us that the “Hawaiian” electric guitar was once expected to put an end to music, just because most of the stuff originally recorded with it was utter trash. Think of Polachek’s “Welcome To My Island” as being to Auto-Tune and MIDI keyboards what “‘Cause We’ve Ended As Lovers”, as performed by Jeff Beck on Blow By Blow, was to the electric guitar: an explicit statement of beauty and maturity.

It stands to reason, however, that if it is possible to make great music with degraded tools, it must also be possible to make degraded music with great tools — which brings us to Trousdale.

I saw Trousdale open for Cory Wong and Victor Wooten last week and was, not to put too fine a point on it, terrified, in the traditional sense; they appeared to have just five notes on which they could harmonize, each of them belted directly into my inner ear via a sound engineer who must have thought they were just the duckiest ducks in Ducktown.

I didn’t think it was fair to damn them just based on this, however; God knows I’ve given a few performances in my life by which I would not like to be judged, although most of them were private. So I went through and listened to more of their music. The above video shows them at their best, I think — which still isn’t very good.

Part of this may be PTSD on my part. The mother of my child, in the early years of our acquaintance, was a big fan of what we would now call the “nepo baby” supergroup Wilson Phillips, whom the reader will perhaps recall from “Hold On”:

Trousdale is uncomfortably close to Wilson Phillips, right down to having a talented one, a pretty one, and a fat one. (I’m also fat, so I can say that, right?) And just like Wilson Phillips, they like nothing better than to scream a basic three-part harmony into the microphone until the mesh bends.

The irony here is that I think the Trousdale girls are better singers than Carnie, Wendy, and Chynna. Two of them are certainly better instrumentalists; I didn’t hear a bad note in an hour-long performance done under considerable pressure. And Georgia Greene, the (perhaps performatively) lesbian singer who plays the tambourine, is a star in her own right. But the sum of the parts is less than it should be. As a bitter old man, I’m tempted to see their public “mission statement” as the root of the problem:

Trousdale is a powerful female band consisting of Quinn D’Andrea, Georgia Greene, and Lauren Jones. Their melodic and heartfelt harmonies are often compared to The Chicks and The Staves, but the girls draw inspiration from a wide array of music, including Crosby Stills and Nash, Kacey Musgraves and HAIM. Driven by their passion to empower young women, Trousdale is committed to making quality music that spreads a message of self-acceptance and love.

Let me tell you, they’re drawing about as much effective “inspiration” from Crosby, Stills, and Nash as I’m drawing fitness inspiration from Fabio. The brilliance of CSN (and to a lesser degree, CSNY) was that they understood how to sing around each other, and also that Stephen Stills was an exceptional talent who essentially ran the band the way Jimmy Page ran Led Zeppelin or Steve Harris runs Iron Maiden. Even the oft-reviled Daylight Again, best described as CSN’s “pay for the yachts with yacht rock” album, has a hundred vocal subtleties that Trousdale couldn’t find with six hands and three flashlights.

As Caroline Polachek shows us, however, it can take a while to grow into one’s talent. We often hear that today’s 24-year-olds are about as mature as an 18-year-old Gen Xer or a 14-year-old from the nineteenth century; with that perspective, it is clear that Trousdale’s work up to this point can be categorized as what we used to call “juvenilia”. They could get better, and perhaps will.

And yet, I wonder. The social media buzz surrounding Trousdale’s early productions is as intense as the critical buzz surrounding Desire, I Want To Turn Into You. It is rare for people to grow artistically when they feel universally adored. Even Lennon and McCartney needed the caustic superiority of Bob Dylan to go from Meet The Beatles to Rubber Soul, while Dylan himself absorbed a disastrous marriage and a tidal wave of critical disdain before producing Blood On The Tracks.

In a world where Caroline Polachek’s father wasn’t a nightmare and her partner in Chairlift wasn’t so eager to leave her behind, would we have this brilliant new record? I doubt it. The French say il faut souffrir pour être belle: you must suffer to be beautiful. Like Florence Welsh, writing “Lungs” in a “council flat” welfare apartment bedroom, or Adele, who felt her body prevented her from being worthy of love and so poured all that anguish into her astounding voice. I don’t think any of the Trousdalers will accomplish anything worthwhile until something happens to unlock a creative power to match their vocal strength.

The unity of suffering and beauty is not universal. Kate Bush was a prodigy who was kind to everyone and instantly beloved of everyone from David Gilmour to the English public. She wrote “The Man With The Child In His Eyes” when she was thirteen. Some people just have it from the jump. It’s a good thing that Caroline Polachek isn’t really another Kate Bush; we’re still getting used to the first one.