Poliça – The Arches, Glasgow 07/02/14

The rhythm is everything.

At first, anyway. With two drummers and a bass player who makes sure he’s high in the mix Poliça certainly don’t skimp when it comes to a bone-shaking, stomach-rattling sound in the live arena. The band’s rhythm section has to be one of the finest constructions in modern pop music; it almost replaces the melody as the hook to each song performed tonight, and it’s hard not to join singer Channy Leaneagh in her stuttering marionette dancing.

Whilst producer Ryan Olson (Gayngs) is clearly a clever man, he’s not one for the limelight and so all credit for this show has to go down to Leaneagh, bassist Chris Bierden and drummers Ben Ivascu and Drew Christopherson. Once the rhythm is set up, it’s time for Leaneagh to become the everything on stage. Singing beside a synth lit up with a battery of lights, pedals at her feet, Leaneagh manipulates and warps her voice in various ways taking it from her pure and clipped Minnesotan origins to somewhere otherworldly. It’s the best use of auto tune and loops I’ve seen and heard in a while as Leaneagh echoes, trills, morphs into something alien, is double and triple-tracked to become a choir of Channys.

What the warping and pitch bending also does is disguise, a touch, the various cruelties that Leaneagh has undergone and which have inspired Poliça’s albums, Give You the Ghost and Shulamith. On the first song tonight, the house-influenced “Spilling Lines”, she sings “I’ll appease them all/Watch me run whenever he calls/Change my clocks to follow his time/Spilling lines they ain’t even mine”, a nod to an unhealthy relationship. The vocal tricks hide to a point the turmoil Leaneagh’s gone through, yet here she is on stage having come through it all, a more assertive and confident individual. Rather than act as a guide, her vocals start to conduct the rhythm section, guiding the bass and drums through time changes and being the trigger for barrages of percussion attacks, like on the incredible “Amongster” where Ivascu provides clever skittering patters through lightening quick hands, and Christopherson eventually joins in with primal, pummelling power.

While the songs from Give You the Ghost are more confident than ever, the tracks we here from Shulamith seem to have become darker since the album release last year. On record “Chain My Name” is synth pop heaven but here it becomes something more passionate as Leaneagh throws her everything into it, and a closing section including “Matty” and “I Need $” is as black and gothic as Poliça has sounded yet. It’s almost a subdued end to the show, but the encore provided an appropriately freeing counterpoint. Leaneagh’s voice is left unadorned during a cover of Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me” (a feminist anthem that seems quite fitting given Shulamith’s own nod to feminist writer Shulamith Firestone) and she looks like she’s having the best time. It might be twenty shows into this tour for Poliça, but it still looks like it means everything in the world to Channy Leaneagh to be singing these songs.