According to their website (www.therapture.com), The Rapture, in various lineups, has been around for years. Yet the group’s first full-length album, Echoes, was only released in 2003. No journeyman work, the disc is a mature, impressive set of songs combining structural elements from numerous musical genres with lyrics which are stark, vivid and frequently moving.
Listening only superficially, you might think you’ve heard this material before. The Rapture is undoubtedly a postmodern band, using a bricolage of musical styles from several genres to ground their compositions (with the similarity of singer/guitarist Luke Jenner’s voice to that of the Cure’s Robert Smith aiding the effect).
However, the group avoids the typical vapidity of many postmodern works by the original musical touches they layer onto the pastiche of 80s punk and 70s disco/funk, and by the extraordinary arrangements of instruments, vocals
and noise which form the fine texture of the individual songs.
A case in point might be the outstanding track “House of Jealous Lovers.” This song clearly has its roots in 70s dance music, opening with a driving drum beat, hand claps, syncopated cow bell and repeated bass note. After several bars, the bass drops out and an echoing, The Edge-like guitar chord-progression begins, soon joined by Mattie Safer’s exciting, mobile, funky bass line. As Jenner starts chanting the lyrics (mainly comprising a repetition of the title), he reduces the guitar to two single notes per phrase until the mania of the strummed single chord of the chorus (“Shakedown!”). There are intermittent musical breaks for noise (handclapping), drumbeats, or recorded shouts of background vocalists. But at the center of the piece is an amazing, atonal, rhythmically irregular guitar solo which fits smoothly into the ambience of the piece. It shouldn’t work, but it does.
Like that track, “Heaven” displays an impressive economy of arrangement and an effective minimalist style. Jenner’s guitar plays mostly single notes throughout the track, with an occasional chord. Often the guitar stops entirely leaving only Safer’s bass and Vito Roccofome’s drums beneath the vocals. The mock-processional style of the final bridge, with its orderly measured chords (alternating four major, four minor) and echoing voices, is deconstructed at the end of the song by the ethereal wailing, in no key and with a complex rhythm, of Gabriel Andruzzi’s sax.
The Rapture use noise to advantage in “I Need Your Love.” The sound is deceptively simple: straightforward dance beat and synth loops, with various noise effects underneath, ending in an instrumental section featuring Andruzzi’s sax and a glockenspiel. The combination of sounds creates an edgy effect which amplifies the emotions of the lyric, a desperate plea for the stability of another’s presence in an uncertain and unpleasant world:
Visions of you or pictures in tabloids
I’ve seen no way out since I was a boy . . ..
Kaleidoscope eyes of killer come near . . . .
I need your love
All I need, all I want.
The focus on the positive effects of love is a frequent theme, whether as a cure for alienation (“Open Up Your Heart”) or simple sweet balm (“Love is all my crippled soul will ever need”). This emotional optimism, however, is complicated by the first and last tracks. Where “Olio” looks back to a dead relationship (“I called you up . . . ‘cause I was lonely/ . . . Like a broken clock/The hand is still/ . . . Ripped up in the shadows/Over and over again”), “Infatuation” focuses on the unattainable (“Infatuaion with the girl/In the coat in the park”).
It’s this sort of emotional and musical flexibility which makes The Rapture an exciting, complex band. Hopefully it won’t take several more years for their next effort to appear.