Album Review: Pirouette by Model/Actriz

Crossing that red velvet rope is an almost religious experience, and now you're dancing with reckless abandon. The moon with the spoon glitters above the crowd as Willi Ninja teaches Mary Antoinette how to stop and turn. Rambo heads to the bathroom with Cinderella, who has once again lost her glass slipper. (She will find it later, remnants of Moet still caught in the toes.) Frankie Knuckles and Stravinsky chat polyrhythms while Donna Summer and Chaka Khan sit on a towering plinth, observing the teeming decadence unfurling before them.

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The followup to Model/Actriz's 2023 debut, Pirouette makes explicit the wide constellation of their influences. Flirting into the melodicism of chart pop, without quite going there, it keeps a firm foot in the dark. Hurtling in with Vespers, like Junior Boys jamming on a bed of hot coals, the first half thunders through with the relentlessness we'd expect - the carnal shrapnel of Cinderella, the menacing Diva.

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With their new album, Pirouette, they opt for restraint, employing more conventional, albeit still-compelling, rhythms and tones. Singer Cole Haden, who throughout Dogsbody veered between playing punk poet and tortured performance artist, now stands at a proverbial ground zero, assessing and/or making peace with existential wreckage. In this way, the band strive for new gestalts, seeking fresh approaches to document the turbulence of contemporary life.

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"It's all the days I starved for the dramaturgy," sings Cole Haden over pulsating percussion on opening track 'Vespers', offering an immediate glimpse into the unrelenting spirit of Model/Actriz's second full-length, 'Pirouette'. The metallic boogie of 'Cinderella' has Cole recalling his desire for a princess-themed birthday party as a young child, but backpedalling due to societal pressure. By contrast, striking highlight 'Diva' sees the frontman at his most self-assured and bragadocious: "I'm such a fucking bitch / Girl, you don't even know / Just imagine me absolutely soaked / Dripping head to toe in Prada Sport.

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Brooklyn's boldest four-piece Model/Actriz showed on their debut ‘Dogsbody’ that they are adept at moulding their sound not with multi-genre fluency, but genreless fluidity altogether with crashing grace. Their blend of brash noise and sultry vulnerability was intoxicating. Even before, they stunned local crowds with their energy and intensity.

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