Class Actress’ Movies EP is either the best- or most poorly timed record of the year. Elizabeth Harper’s synth-pop project, dormant since 2011’s Rapprocher, has not only found a home with legendary disco label Casablanca Records but has gotten as a collaborator its key hitmaker, Giorgio Moroder, himself in the midst of a career revival. And Moroder’s signature sound of implacable synthesizers and L.A. night music has found its way over the past few years to critical darlings, megastars, and newcomers alike. On the other hand, Casablanca has chugged along in various degrees of half-existence over the past decade, home to two Lindsay Lohan records and, until recently, little else; the omnipresence of neo-disco means the genre has been killed, revived, then Family Fun Night-ified out of any of its former transgression; its key session players are well into another golden age of guesting on mediocrities and crap; and the man himself is working with flyweights like Mikky Ekko and Matthew Koma, with gruesome returns.
It’s hardly Harper’s fault that her EP came out almost immediately after Moroder recorded a terrible album; and though she’s given varying stories to the press about when and how she became infatuated with Moroder, enough of the producer's sound throbbed through Rapprocher that her ambition seems sincere. And of ambition, there is no shortage—"I kinda wanted to be the next Donna Summer," she told Billboard, but their voices do share some similarities: suggestive, negligee-light, pairing well with synth strobes. Moroder, perhaps emboldened by working with a single muse again, turns in a more coherent production than Déjà Vu, more Midnight Express than EDM compilation. Movies is a rough concept album: the familiar cautionary tale, older than celluloid, of a woman chasing the lights of Hollywood, the movie version in which all love is unrequited, "girlfriend" is a term that belongs more to escorts than lovers, and everyone is constantly high on something (see: the album cover, an anonymous woman snorting lines off the skyline.) The test is whether it’s easy to fall for.
The first half of the record is the closest to Class Actress’ previous sound, a triptych of songs on obsessive crushes. Returns vary. Languid lead single "More Than You" is competent, and whether it’s a limp "Weekend" reprise or a longingly indulgent sigh depends mostly on the hour of the night, the person on the mind, and the contents of the bloodstream. "The Limit" zips through a wind tunnel of an '80s production, and Harper flits between confidence and vulnerability at ease; but it’s followed by "High on Love", which has a peppy production but a metaphor that was smoked dead before Moroder was born, never mind Harper; her uninspiring elaboration ("They keep you hooked like a drug. The best drug is another person. But when a person becomes a drug it’s dangerous…") does not suggest much further depth.
Originality aside, the main problem with Movies is that it can’t decide how much sleaze and drama it’s willing to commit to. The Neon Indian-produced "GFE", fitting its title, leans well toward the former, asking little of Harper but strutting, cooing, and sighing her way down double entendres, Studio 54 glitz, and vocoder scales, at which she is adept, but offers no glimpse behind the emotional curtain, which is either the problem or the point. "Love My Darkness" wants to evoke the self-consciously moody R&B of 2013 but actually evokes the self-consciously moody trip-hop of 1998; the production is thankfully more dynamic than either, but Harper relies so much on masochistic clichés that it hardly matters.
The title track is the sole outlier: a strings-and-music-box ballad and the narrative’s cruel awakening: "everything I do, I learned in the movies." It’s cinematic, in that it requires the suspense of disbelief, namely the disbelief that what you are hearing isn’t actually "Glory Box" covered by Lana Del Rey—the elephant in the room, for any artist attempting this sort of self-destructive L.A. fantasy. As a Lana Del Rey song, it’s probably better than anything she’d have sung herself; as a piece of sequencing, it’s jarring, like a film skipping directly to its denouement, and might have been better served as a full album closer. And as a self-aware lament, it’s intermittently poignant but, like the album in full, hews a little too close to its conceit: entrancing if you let it be, in love with its star-size emotions, but hollow when the lights come up.
