Live Review: Polica

Polica (Poe-Lisa) have two drummers. You've already got an idea of what that might sound like. They have a bass player (a really good one named Chris Bierden). Finally, you've got Channy Leaneagh driving the thing. Basically, it's a rhythm section with a mouth. They play synth-pop, strip the guts out of it and replace melodic texture with sophisticated geometric drum patterns and driving funk bass lines. Leaneagh has a simple clean vocal style that she manipulates, destroys and rebuilds into prisms and clones, echoing and repeating as she pushes forward. Conceptually they are a perfect booking for Vivid, a festival dedicated to artifice and art coming together. Their performance was solid. Not memorable, but there were moments where the clockwork engines of their songs got a little hot and provided some real thrills.

They opened with Summer Please off United Crushers, their third LP. It began like a James Blake number after too long in the sun: moody post-R&B with Kid A vocals. Once the song moved past the extended intro the energy changed for the better. Drummers Drew Christopherson and Ben Ivascu tapped out speedy drum'n'bass drills (sans any amen breaks), dovetailing each other and creating networks of neat little sequences. They pushed through material from United Crushers (Lime Habit was disappointing) and toyed with their second album Shulamith, but it was pieces from their debut Give You The Ghost that played the best. Amongster in particular, with its rapidfire military snare onslaught at the end, really impressed.

Leaneagh's vocals are perhaps the weakest link in the Polica chain. It exists on a narrow part of the sound spectrum, hovering in place using similar sounds and ideas over and over again, and while tonally it can sound quite effective there's no texture to it. Individual words are difficult to interpret, and hearing it live, it was just another instrument rather than a vehicle for thematic content. The musicians made their mark though, and admirably saved the show from oblivion.