Thalia Hall, Chicago, February 22, 2018
Reviewed by Max McKenna
The collaboration between Poliça and
s t a r g a z e is a collaboration in the most exciting sense—two strong talents, complimenting and pushing against one another. It has so far resulted in a lush and ambitious album, Music for the Long Emergency, out last month from the Minneapolis label Totally Gross National Product, and a brief but electric supporting tour, with only five dates together in the US, including a stop in Chicago.
Self-described “electro anarcho pop group” Poliça is the creative outlet for Minneapolis-based vocalist and lyricist Channy Leaneagh, and producer Ryan Olson, backed by an electric bass and not one, but two drummers. In teaming with s t a r g a z e—a Berlin-based orchestral collective, which, in addition to classical commissions, also often collaborates with pop and indie acts—the personnel has swelled to a dozen musicians (including an entire string quartet), a typically unwieldy number for contemporary pop music.
In certain lights, Poliça and s t a r g a z e look like they want to be a hook-driven synth pop outfit like you might see at a number of venues around Chicago; but in others, they’re straining to be the kind of art-music collective that you’d expect to find in a more institutional space, like a museum or a symphony hall. The collaboration was commissioned by the Liquid Music Series of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, which “develops innovative new projects with iconoclastic artists in unique presentation formats.” The result is kind of weird and indeterminate. The band has two drummers, a surplus that’s almost always impossible to justify. Even the name, Poliça and s t a r g a z e, is far less slick than your usual supergroup.
But it’s that excess that makes the partnership feel fresh, and fresh in a different way. For example, it would be inaccurate to say, as we say about so much pop music with experimental ambitions, that the project occupies a “liminal space” between electro and analog, or to overstate its Europe-meets-Midwest roots, or to say that it draws on classical conventions to subvert some set of expectations listeners have about pop. On their own, either Poliça or s t a r g a z e might fit any or all of these descriptions. But together, they feel large and bold rather than slinky and mutable, earnest rather than subversive.
Partway through their February 22 set at Thalia Hall, two interpretive dancers came onstage to perform to the song, “How Is This Happening.” The band locked into the open-ended coda, and front woman Leaneagh ceded the spotlight to the two dancers, who danced a pas de deux over a whining string drone. The number went from a brooding lament for the Trump era—“resisting him resisting us”— to a modernist ballet. Toward the end of the seventy-minute set, the dancers returned, dressed in red pajamas, for a longer and more complicated number that served as a climax for the entire evening. It seemed as though the dancers were brought in to embody the moments of both difficulty and ecstasy that emerge in the course of an atonal soundscape, lending it immediate and accessible contours that most ambient music makes a point of avoiding.
There’s that quality of emergency to the project, exemplified in the urgent message on Leaneagh’s T-shirt: “Destroy White Supremacy.” But Poliça and s t a r g a z e are also hunkering down for the “long emergency,” an indefinite state of affairs that will require creative solutions to provide sustained relief. One such solution appears to be an unapologetic and unironic commitment to artistic expression in all forms. Orchestral motifs flourish unhindered by the relentless meters of electronica. Moments of avant-garde indulgence exist comfortably alongside exuberant pop. Even the pairing with the opening act, Divide and Dissolve, an Australian noise duo, didn’t feel incongruous. The duo played for less than fifteen minutes, barely engaging the audience; the night before, in Minneapolis, they played for just eight minutes. It takes longer to set up and break down their stacks of amps and drum set than it does for them to perform. Musically, and in terms of performance, they felt quite remote from Poliça and s t a r g a z e. What they share is a common desire to create compellingly.
Poliça and s t a r g a z e want to reach their audience on any level possible. Take the terribly groovy “Fake Like,” the first track on their LP and the penultimate in this performance. The s t a r g a z e section of the band plucks out a mid-tempo pizzicato beat while Leaneagh hooks you in with the refrain: “You want it bad / But you only want it sometimes.” A lot of her lyrics are like this, rendering larger crises in terms of personal dramas. At the same time, as a listener, the words feel pointed. She’s speaking to the coquettishness of audiences who badly want art, music, entertainment, satisfaction—“it”—but who get distracted by a world of “likes” and slipperier gestures like “fake likes.” She wants to breach that in her own way. Poliça and s t a r g a z e are reaching out for peers, for comrades. As the band left the stage, the spotlights turned on the audience.
March 2018