![]() 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. There's really nothing unexpected here, and if you have a large blues collection, there's not much reason to pick this up, but as a sampler, this is first-rate.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. If there is any problem here, it's when the record tilts toward modern blues-rock, but while Jonny Lang, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, and Susan Tedeschi don't quite fit alongside these blues titans, the selections from the Allman Brothers, Stevie Ray Vaughan (a relatively rare live version of "Flood Down in Texas " from an Atlantic album, Blues Explosion, from 1986), and a duet by Eric Clapton and Duane Allman on "Mean Old World" fit right in with the rest of the record. King, Luther Allison, Buddy Guy, and Robert Cray are all here, all represented by some of their finest songs. That means Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Freddy King, Jimmy Reed, John Lee Hooker, Albert King, Koko Taylor, Etta James, Bobby Blue Bland, B.B. This is because Universal's catalog runs deep and contains not just the Chess label, but also such labels as Duke, Peacock, Cadet, and ABC, plus they have the licensing muscle to pull in key tracks from other majors. Pure Blues, one of the latter-day installments, is actually one of the very best of the series, and it's one of the best general blues overviews available, especially for the rock fan that wants to dabble in the genre. The one thing that all the collections shared was that they were exceptional collections that summarized the genre remarkably well. The "pure" in the Pure series initially suggested the unadulterated, soothing dulcet tones of new age in the Pure Moods discs, but as the series took off, Universal Music realized they had a real marketable brand name here, so they decided to use it for different genres.
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