Is it too early to feel nostalgic for the music of just 10 years ago? Not for the bands, necessarily — many of the acts that brought in the new century, from the Rapture to the Strokes, are still around today. But for the stakes, which have changed, not necessarily for the more meaningful.
In 2001, the Rapture were an untested Brooklyn trio a year away from “House of Jealous Lovers,” a song that seemed to contain any number of the narratives that would later define the decade. There was the New York-centric struggle for musical dominance between the disco-influenced post-punk played by bands like the Rapture and the deadpan ’60s rock revivalism represented by bands like the Strokes. And there were the then-familiar issues of underground versus mainstream, “selling out” versus staying true to a more independent, scene-based notion of a career.
Ten years later, we can no longer tell these stories. The Internet has erased even the hardiest geographical affinities, placing every band next to one another on a vast digital plain. And the collapse of the record industry, major label and otherwise, has turned the notion of selling out into mere wishful thinking.
And yet the Rapture, who did desert the smaller DFA label for the corporate embrace of Universal, and whose strident argument for danceable indie-rock now seems like something of an anachronism, are still here. “In the Grace of Your Love,” the band’s fourth full-length and first in five years, is in some ways the product of those old debates, but the band’s music no longer sounds like a niche phenomenon, or an argument for a particular way of doing things. Freed of the context of the past decade, the Rapture have undergone the same transition as every formerly alternative band from Pavement to their old rivals the Strokes, trading in the mantle of opposition for the more modest pleasures of song, structure, and self-examination.
The band’s lost a member, former co-frontman and bassist Matt Safer, and its principal songwriter and vocalist, Luke Jenner, is himself on his second stint with the Rapture, after briefly quitting in 2008. They’ve since resigned with DFA. Between records, Jenner has said in interviews, he became a father and discovered Catholicism, a conversion that seems echoed in many of the band’s newly ecclesiastical lyrics.
But church has always been an appealing metaphor for the makers of disco and dance music. “Help me come to you,” Jenner begs on “How Deep Is Your Love,” the record’s first single and centerpiece. The hook? “Let me hear that song,” as sung to a melody borrowed from Sisqo’s decidedly secular “Thong Song.” The message, as ever, is that God is wherever you find him, on the dance floor or otherwise.
And the Rapture are still making dance music. “Sail Away” is a loping love song — “With you I see hope,” Jenner sings, “I see shame disappear.” “Miss You” and “Never Die Again” are both deadpan stabs at ’80s disco that would slide comfortably into the deejay sets of the Rapture’s label boss, LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy.
Even in the record’s more experimental reaches, which tend toward a more woolly psychedelia — sometimes fast and ecstatic, as on “Blue Bird,” other times wound up and deliberate, as on the title track — the momentum never slows. “In the Grace of Your Love” makes no grand statement, takes no particular stance, beyond the relatively mild assertion that you should be able to dance to it. And in 2011, that’s become a relatively uncontroversial demand.
You could even say they won the argument, if anybody was still interested in having it.
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In 2001, the Rapture were an untested Brooklyn trio a year away from “House of Jealous Lovers,” a song that seemed to contain any number of the narratives that would later define the decade. There was the New York-centric struggle for musical dominance between the disco-influenced post-punk played by bands like the Rapture and the deadpan ’60s rock revivalism represented by bands like the Strokes. And there were the then-familiar issues of underground versus mainstream, “selling out” versus staying true to a more independent, scene-based notion of a career.
Ten years later, we can no longer tell these stories. The Internet has erased even the hardiest geographical affinities, placing every band next to one another on a vast digital plain. And the collapse of the record industry, major label and otherwise, has turned the notion of selling out into mere wishful thinking.
And yet the Rapture, who did desert the smaller DFA label for the corporate embrace of Universal, and whose strident argument for danceable indie-rock now seems like something of an anachronism, are still here. “In the Grace of Your Love,” the band’s fourth full-length and first in five years, is in some ways the product of those old debates, but the band’s music no longer sounds like a niche phenomenon, or an argument for a particular way of doing things. Freed of the context of the past decade, the Rapture have undergone the same transition as every formerly alternative band from Pavement to their old rivals the Strokes, trading in the mantle of opposition for the more modest pleasures of song, structure, and self-examination.
The band’s lost a member, former co-frontman and bassist Matt Safer, and its principal songwriter and vocalist, Luke Jenner, is himself on his second stint with the Rapture, after briefly quitting in 2008. They’ve since resigned with DFA. Between records, Jenner has said in interviews, he became a father and discovered Catholicism, a conversion that seems echoed in many of the band’s newly ecclesiastical lyrics.
But church has always been an appealing metaphor for the makers of disco and dance music. “Help me come to you,” Jenner begs on “How Deep Is Your Love,” the record’s first single and centerpiece. The hook? “Let me hear that song,” as sung to a melody borrowed from Sisqo’s decidedly secular “Thong Song.” The message, as ever, is that God is wherever you find him, on the dance floor or otherwise.
And the Rapture are still making dance music. “Sail Away” is a loping love song — “With you I see hope,” Jenner sings, “I see shame disappear.” “Miss You” and “Never Die Again” are both deadpan stabs at ’80s disco that would slide comfortably into the deejay sets of the Rapture’s label boss, LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy.
Even in the record’s more experimental reaches, which tend toward a more woolly psychedelia — sometimes fast and ecstatic, as on “Blue Bird,” other times wound up and deliberate, as on the title track — the momentum never slows. “In the Grace of Your Love” makes no grand statement, takes no particular stance, beyond the relatively mild assertion that you should be able to dance to it. And in 2011, that’s become a relatively uncontroversial demand.
You could even say they won the argument, if anybody was still interested in having it.
DOWNLOAD FROM ITUNES
