Ramona Lisa - Arcadia LP

Arcadia - Ramona Lisa / Arcadia is the debut studio album by American singer-songwriter and producer Caroline Polachek, under the name Ramona Lisa.

Over the last year, Chairlift's Caroline Polachek was playing secret shows and debuting new material under increasingly inventive, singer-songwriterly pseudonyms such as Ramona Lisa, the name under which she’s presented her solo debut, Arcadia. The album is a quiet curiosity, a quirky side project that’s mostly a labor of love.

Arcadia was composed and recorded entirely on tour and on laptop with MIDI instruments, but the music’s not too recognizably lo-fi or idiosyncratic, especially when compared to some of Chairlift’s past work. There are reprises and recurring motifs that lend Arcadia a conceptual coherence, but Polachek’s songwriting is as broad as it is pared-down. The record works in two modes: for more abstract material like “Hissing Pipes at Dawn (They're Playing Our Song)”, which is, yes, a impressionistic sound-painting of hissing pipes at dawn, there are tracks like “Lady’s Got Gills” and “Backwards and Upwards,” which resemble Chairlift album cuts that were allowed to melt around their chorus sections.