Model/Actrizwith Touching Ice
Wednesday, March 25
Doors: 7pm : Show: 8pm
Motorco Music Hall, Durham, NC
*Moved from Cat's Cradle Back Room*
TICKET LINK: https://www.etix.com/ticket/p/33268637/modelactriz-carrboro-cats-cradle-back-room
Like their name suggests, Model/Actriz seek to channel raw emotions into striking new forms. The band’s surface glamor is supported by nerves of steel, leveraging their focus into moments of wild abandon. Since their songs roar to life off the back of blistering guitar, relentless drums, and pummeling bass there’s an expectation that Model/Actriz aim first and foremost to be shit-starters. But their instrumental muscle couches a searching heart and the Brooklyn quartet have long made a mission to reconcile undefinable feelings by charting a ferocious new path through sound, one that brings jagged emotions back into full, sweaty alignment with the listeners’ bodies.
Their debut record Dogsbody was sexy, dark, and humid, full of eerie passages and veiled menace. Songs like “Amaranth” and “Mosquito” were hot house scenes cast in foreboding half-shadow, with frontman Cole Haden as the hero at the center of its shifting, sultry gloom. The figure he cut was reassuring and ominous, both an experienced guide who could light up the music’s dim corridors and a haunting presence who was inextricably bound to them. The lyrics found him fumbling around in its darkness to become the person he is today – scarred, but made stronger in pursuit of its seduction.
Model/Actriz’s sophomore album Pirouette, which was co-produced and mixed by Seth Manchester and mastered by Matt Colton, their collaborators on Dogsbody, swerves out of the maze and directly into the spotlight. It is Dogsbody’s equally accomplished, but much more self-possessed sister record – thumping and immediate rather than dark and obscure. The light it casts off originates from within, and reflects a band that’s not only grown into its strengths but conquered its demons. Haden no longer vamps from the shadows but at the very front of the stage – and often in the very thick of the crowd – commanding the music’s chaotic center with a poise that channels Grace Jones and Lady Gaga.
After much critical acclaim and an exhausting tour to support the record, the band sought to reinvigorate their visceral live shows that invite that audience into a shared room of carnal ritual. Pirouette is both a natural progression and a calculated reset, a move toward reasserting their command as artists by peeling away the smoke and mirrors to become brighter, heavier, and more direct. The pop thread running throughout the album allows the crowd to witness thumping club music in the spirit of cabaret and manifest the catharsis that comes with hitting the dancefloor.
The word “Pirouette” literally dances on the tongue and few lyricists delectate in the flavor of words as expertly as Haden does. “Like ‘matinee’ or ‘seraglio’” he pouts on “Departures,” “all I want is to be beautiful.” The beauty Haden pines after on Pirouette is the kind that’s forbidden until you give yourself permission to indulge, and even then, it’s an enjoyment that’s tempered by a history of shame. On standout track “Cinderella,” the singer’s strutting bravado suddenly gives way to crushing vulnerability – as he stares into a love interest’s eyes, he recounts the childhood shame of backing out of having a Cinderella-themed birthday party, a psychic scar that he’s still able to trace over years later.
Event Venue
Motorco, 723 Rigsbee Ave, Durham, NC 27701-2138, United States
Tickets
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