book actress

The most impressive thing on Class Actress’ debut full-length album Rapprocher is the voice of Elizabeth Harper. Her rich, powerful, not to mention thoroughly enchanting vocals give the retro-synth pop sound a strength and impact that eludes most bands who chart a similar musical course. Of course, without songs and a decent overall sound, an amazing voice is just an amazing voice. Luckily, the songs and sound are up to the challenge and Rapprocher turns out the match of nearly any synth pop album of the last few decades.

Harper and her bandmate Mark Richardson create a sound that nods to the past but is totally modern at the same time. The synths are clunky like like they were in ’80s, but are also atmospheric and fuzzy like the chilled bedroom practitioners of the 2010s. Richardson conjures plenty of emotion from the simple melody lines and washes of sound, and the beats he comes up with are never less than perfect. Those aforementioned melodies are hooky and memorable, filled with melancholy grace and radio-friendly, singalong choruses. Quite a few of the tracks here (“Weekend,” “Hanging On,” “Need to Know”) would sound right on a comp of forgotten gems of the ’80s, a few would count as greatest hits of the era. The highlights here are the stunning “Love Me Like You Used To,” a close relation to Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Maps,” with Harper sounding nearly as destroyed and raw as Karen O (which is really saying something); “Limousine,” which has a decadent Glass Candy feel, but with even more rain spattering on the windshield, and the heartbreakingly insistent “Keep You.” Above it all is Harper’s voice. The amount of emotion and pain she can put into a single line of lyrics is enough to twist even the coldest new waver into a lump of tears, and the occasional glimpses of happiness that creep in will keep you glowing for hours. She is a singer to treasure, and even a lousy album that featured her would be worth hearing. All the better that Rapprocher is such a perfect blend of vocals, music, and songcraft. You’d have to go a long way to hear a better synth pop album, no matter what decade you examine.

Bad as Me is Tom Waits’ first collection of new material in seven years. He and Kathleen Brennan — wife, co-songwriter, and production partner — have, at the latter’s insistence, come up with a tight-knit collection of short tunes, the longest is just over four minutes. This is a quick, insistent, and woolly aural road trip full of compelling stops and starts. While he’s kept his sonic experimentation — especially with percussion tracks — Waits has returned to blues, rockabilly, rhythm & blues, and jazz as source material. Instead of sprawl and squall, we get chug and choogle. For “Chicago” — via Clint Maedgen’s saxes, Keith Richards’ (who appears sporadically here) and Marc Ribot’s guitars, son Casey Waits’ drums, dad’s banjo, percussion and piano, and Charlie Musselwhite’s harmonica (he appears numerous times here, too) — we get a 21st century take on vintage R&B. Indeed, one can picture Big Joe Turner fronting this clattering rush of grit and groove, and this album is all about groove. Augie Meyers appears on Vox organ and Flea on bass to guide Waits’ tablas and vocals on “Raised Right Men,” a 12-bar stagger filled with delightful lyrical clichés from an America that has passed on into myth — Waits does nothing to de-mystify this; he just makes it greasy and danceable. The slow, spooky “Talking at the Same Time” is still in blues form albeit with ska-styled horns to make things more exotic, as Waits waxes about the current state of economic affairs. He showcases history’s circular nature as he bridges our national narrative from 1929-1941, and up to the present day: “Well it’s hard times for some/For others it’s sweet/Someone makes money when there’s blood in the street…Well we bailed out all the millionaires/They got the fruit/We got the rind…”

Rockabilly rears its head on “Get Lost,” with David Hidalgo strutting a solid ’50s guitar snarl above the horns. Dawn Harms’ violin and Patrick Warren’s keyboards add textural dimension to Hidalgo’s and Ribot’s arid guitars on the apocalyptic blues of “Face to the Highway,” with Waits offering startling, contrasting images in gorgeous rhymes. This track, and the two proceeding ones — the forlorn carny ballad “Pay Me” and the wasted lover’s plea in the West Texas mariachi of “Back in the Crowd” — set up the latter half of the record, where there are more hard-edged blues and rockers, such as the spiky stomping title track, the cracked guitar ramble in “Satisfied,” and the clattering, percussive anti-war rant “Hell Broke Luce” (sic). Between each of these songs are ballads. In the jazzy nightclub blues of “Kiss Me” and the country-ish folk of “Last Leaf” lie lineage traces to Waits’ earliest material: the latter features Richards in a delightfully ruined vocal duet. Indeed, even the set-closer “New Year’s Eve,” with Hidalgo’s guitars and accordion in one of Waits’ signature saloon songs, quotes from “Auld Lang Syne” in the song’s waning moments to send the platter off on a bittersweet, nostalgic note, reminding the listener of Waits’ use of “Waltzing Matilda” in “Tom Traubert’s Blues” all those years ago. Brennan’s instincts were dead-on: it was time for a set of brief, tightly written and arranged songs — something we haven’t actually heard from Waits. Bad as Me is an aural portrait of all the places he’s traveled as a recording artist, which is, in and of itself, illuminating and thoroughly enjoyable.