The no-frills set-up at the City Arts & Music Project requires performers to walk to the stage through the audience. For some, this might pose something of a security challenge, but Channy Leaneagh, the lead singer of Poliça, flitted past unnoticed, like a gamine ghost. That could have been because the Minneapolis band had never played in Britain before. “Is that them?” somebody asked as they took their places. But Leaneagh and her male bandmates also had a diffidence that was surprising, given the reception for their debut album, Give You the Ghost, an autumnal triumph of electronic indie-soul.
Once Poliça got under way, however, it soon became obvious why everyone has been going so gooey, from Jay-Z to Justin Vernon of Bon Iver (“the best band I ever saw”). There was the radical set-up: no guitarists, a hyperactive bassist and two interweaving drummers, one of whom operated a supplementary electronic backing track.
Then there was Leaneagh herself: cropped dark hair, arms whirling like a marionette, poised between restraint and release. On record she uses Auto-tune, the derided computer tool that irons out pop singers’ mistakes, to warp her vocals into exquisite alien shapes. Live, she employed a gizmo called the Helicon VoiceLive 2, which sounded more naturalistic but no less hypnotic.
It was often hard to make out the words as they melted into each other, but it was the sinous musicality of her voice — think a more melodious Björk — that mattered. Combined with that all-action rhythm section and eerie synth flourishes, it gave Violent Games a windswept drama, while Leading to Death added a lolloping groove and Form skirted with spacey ska.
The obvious reference points were Portishead and Mezzanine-era Massive Attack and a more recent touchstone would be the xx; when Leaneagh, between songs, expressed her admiration for James Blake, the dubstep singer-songwriter, that fitted too. But there was something utterly new about the way she played pagan sorceress on Lay Your Cards Out, their breakthrough single, while the highlight was the achingly gorgeous Dark Star, in which her otherworldly vocals threatened to levitate her out of the building. When it was over, Leaneagh made her way back through the crowd. This time, all eyes were on her.