Polica And Stargaze - Music For The Long Emergency (LP)

Some collaborations feel like a clever idea on paper. This one lands in the chest. Released in February 2018 on Totally Gross National Product in the US and Transgressive in the UK and Europe, Music For The Long Emergency pairs Minneapolis synth-pop shapeshifters Poliça with Berlin’s orchestral collective s t a r g a z e, led by conductor André de Ridder. The project began under the wing of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra’s Liquid Music series and you can hear that curatorial care all over it. It is a record built for big rooms and bigger feelings, the sort that sit somewhere between protest and prayer.

Poliça’s calling cards are here, that pliable low end and Channy Leaneagh’s layered, treated voice that flickers between glassy and raw. The twin-drum engine of Drew Christopherson and Ben Ivascu still drives like a pulse you feel in your sternum, while Chris Bierden’s bass stays supple and melodic. s t a r g a z e bring a living, breathing counterpoint, strings and winds that don’t just decorate the songs but push against them, redirect them, sometimes gorgeously, sometimes with a knot in the stomach. Ryan Olson’s production keeps the electronics warm and thick, then leaves air for the ensemble to bloom. Nothing is ornamental. Everything feels argued for.

The centrepiece, How Is This Happening, stretches past the ten-minute mark and earns every second. Leaneagh has said she wrote it in the shock of the 2016 US election night, and you can hear the disorientation in the melody, a kind of stunned keening that never tips into melodrama. s t a r g a z e answer with rising strings that won’t settle, then the drums return like a heartbeat you’re trying to steady. It is one of those rare long-form tracks that grows without grandstanding; if you’ve seen Poliça live, you’ll know how they can hold a room in a slow burn, and this captures that. I’ve put it on late at night and forgotten to do anything else.

Elsewhere the record tightens into sharper shapes. Agree rides a clipped rhythm and one of Leaneagh’s cleanest hooks, a gently barbed melody you end up humming while you make coffee. Fake Like is leaner again, the strings darting in and out of the mix, almost like a second vocalist side-eyeing the lyric. When the group goes widescreen again on the closing title track, Music For The Long Emergency, they commit. It is a long, evolving suite, moving from tense drones to a sweeping release, the kind of finale that makes sense of the album’s title. The phrase itself nods to a world that doesn’t feel like it will snap back to normal any time soon, and the music sits with that reality rather than papering over it.

What makes the album satisfying is how it avoids the clichés of classical crossover. There are no syrupy swells pasted onto pop structures. s t a r g a z e have a history of adventurous pairings, and de Ridder’s arrangements are alive to space and grit. Poliça, for their part, already flirted with process music on 2017’s Bruise Blood EP, a collaboration with s t a r g a z e that reimagined Steve Reich’s Music for Pieces of Wood. You can hear that experience paying off here in the way patterns lock, shift and unlock. The record was made between Minnesota and Berlin, and it carries that push-pull of place too, ice and iron, club and concert hall.

If you’re the sort of listener who still buys with your ears and your hands, Music For The Long Emergency vinyl is the way to go. The low frequencies feel more grounded and the string overtones sit in a proper halo. It is also a nice gateway if you’re hunting for Poliça vinyl generally; their catalogue rewards a proper front-to-back spin. For those digging through crates in a Melbourne record store or looking to buy Poliça records online, this collaboration sits neatly alongside the band’s studio albums and plays well with other Poliça albums on vinyl. It also tends to be the one you pull out to convince a friend who thinks electronics and orchestras don’t mix. They do, if you let them argue like this.

Six years on, the record hasn’t dulled. It sounds like a city late at night, streetlights on wet bitumen, and a head full of news you can’t shake. Not escapism, not quite comfort either, but a humane steadiness. For those of us who live with stacks of vinyl records Australia wide, always on the lookout for something that shifts the air in the room, this is a keeper. Put it on, let the opening minutes take hold, and see if you don’t stay until the last swell fades.