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. 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.
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