And The Award Goes To...

  The integration of Goths and Regs has long remained elusive, but with any luck their epic standoff might be resolved soon.Your potential movement leader:  

Elizabeth Harper and her group Class Actress. Harper was originally a budding success in that hard-to-escape female singersongwriter prison, but has quickly evolved into North Brooklyn’s very own Madonna. In Class Actress, her glacial vocals and the restrained sleaze of Anglophile lyricism are at the forefront, creating affair fantasies on top of an expertly produced bed of ’80s drum programming and analog synthesizers.

I met Harper at Brooklyn Bowl in the midst of New York City’s last great blizzard—a perfect way to introduce the wintry mix present on the group’s Journal Of Ardency EP, out Feb. 6.

“I’m a serious songwriter and Mark [Richardson, band mate and keyboardist] is a serious producer,” she explains when asked about the band’s chemistry. “He makes true analog music and we met in the middle. I was watching Depeche Mode videos the other night and I saw this computer that Martin Gore was sampling off of, and it looked like a monster or something. I don’t know how they make those sounds.Then you think: How did Madonna do ‘Everybody’ in 1982? That snare sound is fantastic. I listen to that record, without fail, every other day. Girl groups with loud beats—that’s it.”

It’s actually a bit puzzling that so few acts have successfully merged Madonna, Ace of Base and Mariah Carey with bands like The Smiths, Human League and New Order. Class Actress taps into the melodic tendencies of our finest pop jams and sprinkles them with tropes from our most addictively depressing forefathers. On “Someone Real,” Harper seductively coos: “I just want someone real to love” over snowy sine waves that grow into violent ecstasy as the track settles. The drums, scientifically removed from early 1980s vinyl sources, bounce and crack like a Downtown super-club stampede.

“I don’t want to copy, but I want to nail a specific sound,” Harper says while picking at salmon backstage. “We tape up our keyboards, for example. If you don’t know what keyboards we’re playing, don’t ask us because it’s covered up. After every show, someone tries. Mystery is good.This band is about taking it back. Society is too far gone.We want to bring it back to what it felt like in 1991 [when] people were a little more romantic.”

Harper’s iced-out vocals and songwriting are based around a sort of idealistic yearning, but often derail from healthy self-doubt.

“Careful What You Say” is all about hiding secret obsession in a 21st-century urban setting. Harper sings, “Careful what you say/ it hurts me when you talk that way,” a simplistic yet effective pop lyric about the dangers of avoiding reality. On the title track, she nearly whispers, “Everybody knows/ everybody sees/ this is the thing you do to me.”

For Harper, it’s both the means of escape and inspiration to write.

“I never say what I really feel, because I don’t want to get hurt,” she reflects. “I get hurt so easily.When I go home, I get to write about it and say it. I wish, so badly, that I could live in the moment. I want to throw my arms around someone and be like, ‘I really like you,’ but I don’t. I pretend like I don’t notice they’re there. I go home and think about it. It’s a muse rather than a reality.”

You get the sense that in high school, Harper wanted to be the cheerleader but was actually the theater nerd. Now, both styles are merged in Class Actress. It’s an appealing formula that could garner some serious accolades in coming months as people start anticipating a full-length for late 2010. In turn, Harper is dead serious about bringing her songs and sounds to the masses.

“This is life or death,” Harper exclaims.

“Music is life or death. It’s all about passion and the moment. I want to take this as far as I fucking can. Sometimes when you’re fucked up, what you experience communicating to a large group is so much more intimate than what you can communicate to a single person. It’s like coming up for air. It’s all you crave.That’s all anyone wants.”

-- Class Actress Feb. 6, Glasslands, 289 Kent Ave. (at S. 2nd St.), Brooklyn, 718-599-1450; 8:30, $10. Also, Feb. 9 at Music Hall of Williamsburg.