Give You the Ghost

It'd be easy to breeze through Give Up the Ghost on first listen and take away nothing but the beauty of it all. Yet it sucks you in, and with every listen a new line flickers into the fray.

While it's an album prime for some excellent live renditions, it's the tendency to brood too much or even approach tedium at some points leaves further room for the development of this sound.

This record is an exploration into the synergy of reengineering technology and humanity. Let yourself be taken on the journey.

Through the clever synchronization of spaced-out vocals and rambling drums, Poliça dispels psychological trauma in an easy-to-swallow, electro-pop pill.

Polica succeeds because they cover a lot of ground with few moving parts.

Combined with the hypnotic instrumentation that blankets the record, it's easy to immerse yourself and get lost in its alluring character.

It's the interpretation of a human voice that elevates this record beyond a curious obscurist record and makes the simmering (but never boiling over) electronica truly shimmer.

It starts losing its nuance halfway through, creating a distraction from the effort as a whole.

The album works best listened to in its entirely rather than separating each cut from one another.

My only real complaint is that the physicality of the bass and drums could have been emphasized to an even greater degree-- while your ear is constantly drawn to the rhythm section's permutations, Leaneagh's voice sits perhaps a bit too prominently in the mix, and the exhilarating wildness of the drumming is often suggested rather than truly felt.

Despite Leaneagh's claims that Auto-Tune and other effects are an attempt to render her voice just another instrument in the mix, Give You the Ghost is decidedly an album predicated on her vocals, even if it's not a "singer's album" in the traditional sense.

A bewitching, urgent, magical debut. [May 2012, p.103]

The songs are of a piece with Olson and Casselle's previous work, yet slower, more tender--less sharp tongue and more soft cheek.

Give You the Ghost is only as transfixing as its singer.

It's an album that reels you in, enveloping everything in a black mist, from the slick protestations of 'Dark Star' to the surging intensity of closer 'Leading To Death'.