In the winter of 2018, Poliça singer Channy Leaneagh was clearing ice off her roof when she slipped and fell 10 feet to the ground. The landing broke a vertebra, damaged her spine, and left her unable to walk. What at first seemed like a curse—being stuck in a brace prevented her from working or taking care of her children—quickly became an opportunity, giving Leaneagh time to sit with her thoughts and confront traumas old and new.
Poliça’s fifth album, When We Stay Alive, features some of the most piercing lyrics of Leaneagh’s career, half of which were written after the accident. But the rest of the Minneapolis electro-pop group doesn’t sound emotionally invested in their performance. As a result, the album is less a humanistic look at what it’s like to be given a second chance at life than it is an example of what happens when your bandmates leave you hanging.
Filled with a renewed appreciation for life, Leaneagh found herself writing songs about her daily lived experience—the chase for stability in parenting, her experience protesting pollution in her neighborhood—which draw empathy from small details rather than grand gestures. She sounds newly raw when wrestling with her post-injury demons, as on the glossy “Feel Life.” “Screaming at death/‘Why won’t you stick?’/To feel I’ve failed, and I felt it,” she sings gracefully, despite the audible fear lingering on her tongue. Her voice alternates between soothing coos and a downtrodden lilt as if she’s breaking bad news gently, a singer finding her form in undesirable circumstances.
But the rest of the band—producer Ryan Olson, bassist Chris Bierdenand, and drummers Ben Ivascu and Drew Christopherson—can’t keep up with Leaneagh. They dial the production in to the point of sterile perfection, sounding occasionally like a pre-loaded backing track, divorced from the meaning of Leaneagh’s words. The percussion is hollow, and the synths are like afterthoughts; on songs like “Be Again” and “Steady,” unexpected samples pierce the atmosphere like the blade of a pocketknife accidentally swinging open, distracting and damaging instead of flashy or fun. Poliça’s members recorded the parts of When We Stay Alive separately, exchanging files over the internet, and the isolation of that process is discernible.
The band also invited a cast of dance and hip-hop producer pals to tinker with the tracks as they saw fit, which may have exacerbated the emotionless feel of the instrumentation. Poliça intended for this to be a form of musical collaging: a little cello here, some extra keys there. But the end results resemble a boardroom’s out-of-touch predictions for what cool music sounds like right now.
For a band that found fame with live shows verging on jam sessions, Poliça strangely embrace the opposite now: impassiveness, rigidity, disconnectedness. When We Stay Alive finds a certain stride when it emphasizes that mechanical tendency. “Fold Up,” moored by electronic drums and croaking synths, flourishes by upping the tempo, veering toward the pleasantly mysterious territory of Thom Yorke’s Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes. A few other tracks start off similarly strong, like the sweeping “Sea Without Blue” and the aptly titled “Driving,” but eventually lose steam, leaving Leaneagh adrift in tepid beats. For a record born from a second chance at life, When We Stay Alive sounds disenchanted with its own message.
Buy: Rough Trade
