Polica - Shulamith

A mere 18 months from their astonishing debut, the second outing from Minnesota’s Polica plunges deeper into the well of soulful angst that was a feature of their first album. On that record, front-woman Channy Leaneagh was channeling the heartache of her divorce; this time she seems to be processing the mix of excitement and confusion that comes with fronting a successful band required to spend much of the year touring (and thus, apart from her infant daughter).
The biggest change is the quartet’s pursuit of the groove: single ‘Chain My Name’ is relentlessly dancefloor-inclined; ‘Vegas’ erupts into a stark funk break-down, a groovy catharsis that blends surprisingly well with Leaneagh’s dulcet warble. Shulamith is less immediate than predecessor Give You The Ghost and perhaps ambivalent about how accessible it wishes to be (a disastrous show at London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire by all accounts caused Polica to question the overnight trajectory of their rise and whether it was truly what they wanted). But it casts a spell of its own: its magic, deep, slow and mysterious.