Poliça: Shulamith

Last year’s debut from Minneapolis indie-electronica band Poliça thrived in the interplay between the band’s equal and opposite halves.
The two drummers and bass player laid the foundation of an art-rock R&B, while Ryan Olson’s synthesizers and beats and Channy Leaneagh’s adventurously manipulated vocals created the album’s space-age sheen.
But while Give You The Ghost was a mostly subdued and meditative album, its songs living (despite the two drummers) in a sort of natural constraint, the band’s follow-up, Shulamith, is hyper and edgy, driven by a manic tension that pushes both Poliça’s physical and synthetic spheres into new realms. Even before the album’s release, the striking cover image and two videos of tangled meanings began making the argument that Shulamith is the work of a band untethered from its past, weaving a sense of conflict into the core of its songs.
The bloody imagery of the cover—the smudged red contrasting with the deep blue background—highlights the tension in the songs, while the title functions as both an homage to radical feminist Shulamith Firestone and an obscure Old Testament reference about the complicated nature of womanhood. The graphically violent video for “Tiff,” which Leaneagh calls “a portrait of a woman as her own worst enemy,” is a surreal and sadistic depiction of torture—beating and waterboarding—that portrays her as victim and tormentor both.
This duality, though never so explicit, echoes throughout the album, with Leaneagh’s lyrics turning on questions of identity, desire, vanity, self-reliance, sacrifice and the roles established in pursuit of (or retreat from) romance.
The album’s other pre-release video, for “Warrior Lord,” is split between underwater shots and woodsy imagery. The video, like the song, advances a different sort of tension, its overall sense of calm never quite able to entirely conceal an undercurrent of danger.