Carotid Cabaret Live Music Review

Amaranth / opening / through the noise / scarlet beckoning

The room is carotid red. The dance floor, seating and stage vacant. We’re early. I and a concert-habituant buddy grab a table. Securing appropriate alcohol, I stroll over to check out the merch. A man and a woman stand at the table. As I peruse, I make conversation: “You travel with the band or are you KC?”

The man responds in a kind but road-weary exhale, “I guess you could say I travel with the band…”

I look up, “Well shit! Cole.”

In street clothes, sans makeup, he is somehow only a fellow civilian, not the front-man for Model/Actriz. He consents to a selfie before heading off backstage. I add another item of concert gear to my collection and settle in for the show.

The opening “band” (a singer and a drummer): Body Meat, offer only retreads of the currently requisite tropes and musical memes (computer rhythms, bass drops and sudden volumetric switch ups). In spite of a decent voice, they present little more than computer-centric karaoke with a light show. Forgettable. (To be fair, next day I revisit their work via the streams. Forgettable)

Model/Actriz, however, are not.

Down the hall from the green room, a fog-machined concert vid, they came: Cole bounding all Muhammed Ali in black gossamer shawl and elbow gloves; the rest tradesmen striding in T’s and work boots. My buddy and I move to stage left — a better view of both band and fans.

It commences:

Frenetic. Urgent. A Steve Reich-ian phalanx punctuated by abrupt, data-precise rhythmic change-ups. A pervasive underpinning of sonic noise — Jesus and the Mary Chain over Niagara’s falls in a barrel! Tonight’s audience begins to move, to seethe. It could be the opening rave from Blade II, minus the violence and avarice and hatred.

Poppy careens into Mosquito…

I want this life, I want this life, I want this life…
…with a body count higher than a mosquito

Wetmore’s right hand is legato, disciplined. A Johnny Ramone/Gary Myrick rain of downstrokes. Strings dampened, percussively atonal, more rhythm than melody. I watch Shapiro stoop to manipulate a bank of peddles, his pluck hand, fingers tapping just above the pickups, an analogue, human re-visioning of the automated ethos. Radlauer’s hi-hat is staccato; his snare crisp. A weird, bubble-warped, ride symbol, offering up a trashcan lid of punctuation.

So often these days, performers abdicate the humanness to programed algorithmic generators, computer upon computer littering tables. Model/Actriz’s insistence on the materiality of the human performance adds a certain warmness to an otherwise cold musical soundscape — similar to what an old tube amp or audio receiver ads to a listening experience. It strangely evokes a revisioned, tactile, Einesturzende Neubauten performance.

Then there is Cole. One simply cannot overlook Cole even if you wanted (and who would want to?).

Physicality. Not exploited per se, but exposed and explored, directed outward.

When I was five I remember clearly
my want to have a Cinderella birthday party.

Undulating. Sexual. Vigorous. Ambidextrous, yes. Queer in so many senses of the word, but not necessarily evangelical. His trust of the crowd is implicit. I couldn’t shake that I was witnessing a nascent Iggy or Jagger. Such a markedly different persona from the quiet man at the merch table. It was nearly impossible to chain him to the stage. Cole feeds on the crowd. Yet there is reciprocity. Trailing a cable, he repeatedly ventures out into the dancing masses. He climbs atop the hi-tables, a vampiric pole dancer, to rub against the room’s towering pillars. Seated on the floor amidst the sea of bodies, he brings all to their knees to be near him as he softens the dynamic, injects melody. It would be interesting to take in another show, to observe if this symbiosis is from Cole to the audience or the audience to Cole.

Album credits proclaim that the music belongs to the band, but the lyrics are the provenance of Cole. And they offer a definite poetry, sharp-jointed and vulnerable. Amidst this sonic landscape, juxtaposed against relentless, mechanized disharmony, they offer respite, relief, an oasis of unabashed beauty. They capture so well the current existential frontier of dislocation here along the collapse of 1,000 years of culture and the global biome. Is it any wonder so many no longer pay creed to old social-sexual norms? All is turbulent and we are left only to search for someone, anyone, to reach out and touch our humanness?

Just know I'll keep the mirror you gave
Just know I won't leave as I came

One critic tried to describe it as “…dissonance and noise with live belligerence.” They are wrong. It is not belligerence. It is something else. Dissonance, yes. Like the apps that harness atmospheric static to generate uncrackable passwords. To the invited, it offers secure communications with any who posses the key.

Embodying Ouija strength, Nero leaks through my teeth…
enter into my pure mode

Is there a click track? Perhaps. Does the machine pilot from the cloud? Likely. Do i care? No. Like a terminator gifted from some future, the veneer of humanity is real even if encasing the machine.

Model/Actriz leave the stage and do not return. More than a fine, fine show, I cannot help but feel that I have just witnessed something important.
The crowd lingers, fidgets. Again and again begging for more. Its been many a year since I witness an audience so truly, not performatively, wanting more. They ask and ask and ask. For a good half hour they ask…

Leave ‘em wanting the old saying goes…. Everyone did, as did I .

Model/Actriz is:
Cole Haden - Vocals
Jack Wetmore - Guitar
Aaron Shapiro - Bassist
Ruben Radlauer - Drums

To date, they have released two full-length albums: Dogsbody (2023) and this year’s Pirouette (the remix single of Vespers is pretty damn sweet, as well…)

Model/Actriz music can be found here (bandcamp.)