A good friend of mine from Minneapolis introduced me to a local band called Poliça earlier this year via a performance video from Minnesota public radio station The Current. I loved the song (the name "Wandering Star" also caught my attention as it's the name of one of my favorite Portishead songs), but what really got my attention was the double drummers!

But I have to admit I didn't follow through to discover more about the band until I went back to Minnesota this spring. I heard Poliça on the radio there and responded to the music again, this time vowing to listen to the whole album when I came home. Which I did, on repeat.


The band consists of vocalist Channy Leaneagh (formerly Channy Casselle), bassist Chris Bierden and drummers Ben Ivascu and Drew Christopherson. But the other important person involved with the band is not technically a band member. Instrumentalist Ryan Olson, who was in Gayngs with Leaneagh, helped shape the band from its very start. The two started working on songs together, with Olson providing electronic beats and Leaneagh singing the melodies, even before there were actual words and lyrics. Then Olson brought in Beirden to lay down bass lines, and contacted Ivascu and Christopherson about being the new band's drummers. Together, they became Poliça.

A few things strike you right away when you listen to their music. One is that Leaneagh's vocals are manipulated by effects pedals and auto-tune, which she says adds drama and allows her voice to be viewed more as an instrument. The second, is the overall mood of the album - dark, slightly aggressive, and beautiful. And slinky, if that could be considered a mood. See the video for "Lay Your Cards Out" as an example.

For most of my life I have been an avid reader, but for the last six months - or even a year if I'm being honest with myself - I've struggled to finish books, forcing myself to make the time to read. Happily, that streak has been broken with the new memoir by Mike Doughty, The Book of Drugs (Da Capo Press, 2012). I read it the first time in about two days, inhaling it as fast as I could between work and sleep. As soon as I finished it, I began reading it again. 

Mike Doughty is a solo artist today, but I came to know him as the frontman for Soul Coughing. The book's primary plotline is about his relationship with drugs, the trajectory of his addictions, and his recovery. But the secondary plot is about his relationship with, and to, his former band. Admittedly, that is why I picked up the book. Addiction in and of itself isn't as interesting to me as the person who is telling the story of addiction, and I was very interested in what Mike Doughty, the former lead singer, guitarist and lyricists for one of my favorite bands, had to say.

One of the things that I most appreciated about Soul Coughing was the mixture of intelligence and quirkiness, the wordplay and the soundplay (we'll pretend that's an actual word). Doughty uses those strengths in The Book of Drugs, telling his story with humor, wit, honesty, self-reflection, anger, passion, and sorrow. (For someone who says he was out of touch with his feelings for so long due to his addictions, he has come a long way in accessing those emotions and laying them on the page.) 

For me, the most salient scene from the book that illustrates how much his addiction affected him involved his daily trip to the ATM four blocks away. He would call his dealer and then descend his apartment building's stairs (a thirty minute process one way), walk down the block, and across a larger intersection. The whole trip - four blocks - took him ninety minutes, sometimes two hours. The fact that the ordeal of walking a few blocks seemed to him like a natural side effect of aging (he was thirty-something at the time), and not a by-product of his drug habit, was heartbreaking.