Some of us are always looking for stimuli that can make us feel quite a lot like prowlers, also like victims and additionally stylish cusses who can always be found with a drink in their hands and eyes that are as equally telling as they are forbidding. We like to think that we can pull off the look of the guy or the girl in the darkened bar who is permanently unapproachable, unattainable - so much so, that they aren't approached and they go on being unattained and therefore, lonely as hell. It's a condition that's great for the look and horrible for the spirit. It just sobs with emptiness, a big and gaping chasm between needs and what's being had.
It's the constitution of a Polica song, or something resembling the mystique of a Polica song, but especially that of the Minneapolis group's stunningly enchanting and love-tortured singer and songwriter, Channy Leaneagh. She brings into her songs a sense that there's a lot out there that's not going to be easy to take or to get. There's always this feeling that the words she's singing now, about a hard time with love, are going to be reprised years later, in a different form, involving her and a different person and a set of circumstances and problems that just aren't working out once again. There's a sense of the vicious cycle that could just keep going around and around, spinning manically until the end of it, or whatever precedes the end. There's a feeling that some choices have been made and she might be getting what she deserved - the good and the bad, in the dosages destined for her.
Leaneagh is a masterful writer and the songs come out of her as if they are supposed to - and likely do - mean much more than we're actually privileged to knowing. They are intricate snapshots of emotions far deeper than we can comprehend. She sings about love and death, as if there wasn't much of a difference in the two. One seems to involve colder sheets than the other does, but they can sometimes share characteristics. She sings that she's "married to the wandering star" and it could be that this is the sort of thing that causes her so much of the aching that she presents to us, or it could be the crutch that she relies on to protect her from all of the ache that's finding her, right there where it left her the last time. She seems as if she's able to move on, despite the solitude that she might be moving into, despite the thought that the corner and the lonely drinks are going to have to be accepted as standard again. She sings, "It's a brand new day and I'm sorry/I will never take away/Fall in and out of love with me/Spare me the misery," and we can already hear that she's going to be fine with it all, for a while, until it happens all over again.