![]() ![]() She fronted the aughts indie band Chairlift (you may know it from the 2008 Apple commercial), co-wrote a Beyoncé song (the slick, lithe “No Angel” from 2013), and earned New Yorker profile treatment and the title of Pitchfork’s favorite song of 2021. And it represents a culmination for Polachek, who has already cut a shimmering trail through culture. It conjures not what new age really was or what it became, but what it once seemed to be from a distance: actual magic. Polachek’s new album, Desire, I Want to Turn Into You, locates that realm. As my generation grew up, new age seemed a bit like a lost world-a faerie realm we were promised but never got to go to. ![]() During the ’90s, it was absorbed back into pop and rock, thanks to trip-hop and Tool and Madonna’s Ray of Light, leaving the purest of mood music to circulate mainly in crystal-healing shops. A calming blend of electronic instrumentation and global folk traditions, the style had its roots in the hippie era but became a commercial phenomenon in the late ’80s. During childhood, many of us Millennials only ever got to catch glimmers, like rare fireflies, of the sound known as new age. Pure Moods ads, laden with unicorns and Enya, were welcome bursts of enchantment between Nickelodeon episodes.Ĭaroline Polachek, a 37-year-old pop innovator, may well have had the same relationship with those ads. But if you’d told me the same thing in 1994, I’d have said that the future sounded cool. Masterful parody of PURE MOODS from the 10-year-old ? /L7AJcjClwOĪnd this is why you shop at your local record store.If you’d told any music connoisseur living in the year 1994 that one of the hottest albums of the year 2023 would sound like Pure Moods, the relaxing compilation CD then being sold on TV commercials for $17.99 (plus shipping and handling), that person might have laughed. ![]() He even went so far as to make a parody of the compilation called Cringe Moods: We started reciting some of the lines around the house. He got really into it, especially the infomercial. I thought it would be hilarious to play my 10-year-old the album after pizza night. “Plural! There is no one mood, but they’re all Pure.” “But what mood?” Meg asked me after I played her a few tracks. The model, deemed “a huge buzz” after selling more than 2 million copies prior to its formal drop, would be replicated five times over with a tetralogy of sequels in the releases of Pure Moods II-IV. Their clunky but satisfying cohesion can be attributed to the cataloguing done by the Virgin heads, who arranged the piece on a lark, “stumbling into the project” as an experiment to determine if an album could be successfully telemarketed and sold far before its release date. These were tracks and artists never designed to be played alongside one another, tracks and artists, for all intents and purposes, mostly foreign to one another except in essence. Luckily, Mina Tavakoli wrote a great review for Pitchfork a few years ago that delves into its weird history: I wanted to know more about this crazy artifact from 1994. I didn’t even bother looking at the tracklist until I got home - sure, there was Enya and Kenny G, but also Morricone, Vangelis, Badalamenti and Brian Eno?!? This thing is wild: The minute I saw the cover, I remembered that “Return to Innocence” song blasting during the infomercials: “Imagine…a world…where time drifts slowly…”įor laughs, I pulled this copy of Pure Moods out of the free box while record shopping at End of an Ear. ![]()
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