The Rapture

The Rapture's debut sounds like peak period Robert Smith howling over pulsating, electro rhythms, with the occasional guitar ripping through it all with an unhinged art-punk fury. Chances are, you weren't born or didn't care when disco-punk first surfaced. In that case, this might just be groundbreaking stuff.

The Rapture stand tall among New York's latest wave of art-damaged punk-disco bands.
People like to compare these groups to early-Nineties British rave rockers. But the
comparison doesn't work, because New York bands such as the Rapture, the Liars and !!!
actually rock, while the Happy Mondays sucked, Jesus Jones sucked monkeys, and EMF
sucked gorillas through a screen door. The key is rhythm: The acid-house band... More >

"House of Jealous Lovers" so dominates that it takes a while to glom onto the other uptempo numbers, which means most of them. With headman Luke Jenner flaunting his tortured-romance shtick--a clarion Ian Curtis-Robert Smith hybrid only not really depressed, because he gets off on pretending to be--this is mannerist DOR more accomplished and less sentimental than its sources. Title tune flows out of great hit so naturally you hardly notice the segue, and dig the synthesized train horn that adjoins the saxophone noises on "I Need Your Love." I wish they'd make a pass at Killing Joke's "Change" or Medium Medium's "Hungry So Angry." But more likely Jenner is on the hunt for a hit ballad even as I write. (Grade - A-)