Like Poliça’s stunning debut album, Give You The Ghost, Wednesday night’s show at Mercury Lounge kicked off with “Amongster.” Ben Ivascu and Drew Christopherson each manning a drum set of their own, handled the track’s intricate percussion, while bassist Chris Bierdan and a box full of pre-recorded loops took care of the rest of the song’s instrumentation. Make no mistake, though, Channy Leaneagh is the star of this show. Bathed in blue for the duration of the show, Leaneagh and her formidable voice took center stage, capturing the audience in a rapturous and ethereal trance. This is Poliça; this is awesome.
Leaneagh, formerly of Minneapolis mainstay Roma di Luna, has spoken openly about the difficulties of translating Give You The Ghost’s songs to stage. And, to be sure, recordings do a lot of heavy lifting in concert. But the more pressing challenge – figuring out how to replicate the autotune-like vocal effects and layered voice tracks that are so arresting on tape – was solved simply and gracefully. Leaneagh has the pipes to drive these songs home with little help, so only small touches of electronic modulation were applied to match the album’s sonics. Lightly swaddled in reverb, her voice took on an unexpectedly human and organic vibe.
Vibe is really the word of the night – these songs aren’t the most aggressive and, despite the double dose of drums, they stayed that way on stage. Though the band is reportedly named after the Polish word for “urgent action,” Poliça is perfectly content eschew anything frenetic in favor of spinning the sort of dreamily effective songs that make bands like Warpaint and Bon Iver so captivating in concert.
The increased presence of percussion does make the sometimes-sleepy songs danceable, though – a fact that the gyrating crowd certainly acknowledged. Indeed, Poliça seems to have a more defined live identity than the somewhat at-arms-distance sound of Give You The Ghost. The first salvo of songs were written in a month’s time and the band was formed at short notice, so it would seem that we are witnessing the group take shape, night after night, in front of our eyes. The handful of new songs played on Wednesday night belie greater confidence, a few more steps in the direction of making this band a sustainable project.
Limited by the live set-up, Poliça further simplified songs like “The Maker,” which lean heavily on vocal effects. They took on a beautiful simplicity, and some of the most stripped down songs proved to be highlights of a uniformly impressive set. I suspect much of the puzzling lack of publicity Poliça and Give You The Ghost have gotten is the result of immediate autotune backlash, and it seems the band may be listening. The packed house at Mercury Lounge (and the night before at Rock Shop) certainly liked what they heard. If Poliça continues to take off some layers and show some more skin, so to speak, they’ll be very hard to ignore.
