Poliça : Give You The Ghost
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Poliça : Give You The Ghost

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The debut from Poliça captures a painful period for lead vocalist, Channy Leaneagh. It’s a breakup album and a complicated one at that, with Leaneagh’s split from her husband also divorcing her from her closest musical collaborator. Give You The Ghost is a mess of emotions, though it takes an active, immediate approach to dealing with the end of a relationship and the subsequent picking up the pieces.

 

Like fellow Gayngs collaborator Justin Vernon, Leaneagh loves a bit of vocal manipulation.

 

She delivers a soulful vocal, one that’s aggressively alienated with Autotune. The vocal may be washed out in reverb, but it surges to the forefront of the mix, with the rhythm section relegated to the background. Even though Leaneagh often sounds like she’s trying to catch up with the music, the vocal ends up dominating proceedings and is the hook that pulls you further in.

 

Poliça take a manipulated vocal with heartbroken lyrics and set it to lively, eclectic music that seems completely at odds with the vocalist’s situation. It makes for an eye-opening meshing of styles that shouldn’t work, but does. The end result is a steady, seductive listen that has intermittent peaks along the way: the mystical, soulful Dark Star; the sultry trip-hop simmer of lead single Lay Your Cards Out and the eloquent closer, Wandering Star. Given the album’s subject matter, it should be a painful listen; instead, it’s oddly celebratory.

 

BY CHRIS GIRDLER

 

Best tTack: Lay Your Cards Out

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In A Word: Manipulated