Chairlift is Caroline Please and patrickWhat. Chairlift’s songs pivot around a hazily romantic, fragmented, psychedelic sense of humor and love for pop music. After touring their ?rst record, Does You Inspire You (2008), the band retreated into the a spare room of an antique shop for a year to produce their upcoming album, which is currently being debuted in live-band form throughout the spring/summer of 2011. New themes in their music include gothic pastoral, pizza punk, infomercial spiritual, road-rage surf, and faux-jazz sulk.

Elizabeth Harper, a former drama major from Los Angeles, had been writing delicate, wistful songs of longing and detachment for several years when she met musician & psychoanalyst-in-training Mark Richardson in 2009 and asked him to remix one of her tracks. Their creative chemistry was instantaneous – Mark’s production style was cerebral but sensual, relying heavily on vintage synths and drum machines, and influenced by ‘80s bands like Human League and Depeche Mode while still conscious of modern club sounds steeped in hip hop and house. It perfectly complemented the melancholy undertone in Harper’s songs and revealed in them an urge towards ecstatic abandon.

Along with multi-instrumentalist/engineer Scott Rosenthal, the two formed Class Actress and recorded the debut EP Journal of Ardency, which was released to much acclaim by Chris Taylor’s (of Grizzly Bear) Terrible Records in 2010.

In the year since, Class Actress toured the US, Europe and South America, Mark worked towards attaining his PHD, and the band completed a new full-length record, entitled Rapprocher, which is French for “to come close to.”

The pleasure and sorrow of romantic connection are inescapably entwined in Harper’s lyrics, while the smooth, cool surfaces of Richardson’s production conjure an eternal after-hours nightlife that Harper inhabits fearlessly, displaying a provocative, wounded raw sexuality that some reviewers have compared to early Madonna.

Class Actress is: Guilty Pleasure. NSA dance music. Casual Encounters. Stalker Pop. Depeche Mode meets early Madonna and Five Star as heard on the radio in the leather backseat of a cab.

Class Actress is not: Acting Class.

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