Auto-Tune, the pitch-correction software that squares off wobbly vocals until they resemble Tetris blocks, has come to symbolise everything that is garish and wrong about modern music. Yet Poliça have become one of 2012's most alluring acts by deploying the technique in unexpected ways. Their funereal, deep-sea R&B has made fans of everyone from Bon Iver to noted Auto-Tune sceptic Jay-Z.
Any band from Minneapolis exists in the shadow of Prince, and the touring incarnation of Poliça don't skimp on the rhythm section, with two drummers (and two full drumkits) shadowed by a lolloping, casually gifted bassist. Laptops and black boxes strewn at her feet, singer Channy Leaneagh initially looks outgunned by her three bandmates. But even her unadorned voice is startling enough to cut through their metronomic brew.
The vocal warping creeps in slowly. On the dubby, eerie I See My Mother, Leaneagh's voice artificially trills and fractures as she sings about swallowing whiskey and taking powder. Midway through Dark Star, a brassy, spiralling march that wouldn't sound out of place on the Drive soundtrack, an unexpected choral effect summons harmonies out of thin air. It's a nifty sonic conjuring trick.
Partly, they rely on skilled stagecraft. Leaneagh controls and triggers key effects through her microphone via moment-to-moment modulations of volume. It's a performance that has to double as a programming punchcard, and it should make these wilfully dense songs – mostly recorded in a two-week burst after the dissolution of her marriage – even harder to decode.
No matter how alien Leaneagh sounds, though, there remains an emotional core to Poliça that is both irresistible and slightly overwhelming, a spiritual cousin to the deafening instrumental catharsis of Mogwai. The clattering finale Amongster – where both drummers are permitted to go "full Slipknot" – feels like being bathed in cosmic rays: a little scary, but exciting.
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