New York disco-rock groove

(Morning Star, Friday 01 September 2006)

ALBUM: The Rapture - Pieces of The People We Love
(Mercury)

NEW YORK band The Rapture make music that is an aquired taste. It's a sound that everyone should make acquiring their top priority.

Three years after their debut burst onto the impossibly cool disco-rock scene, the quartet are back to basics with this confident document to life as an established act.

From opener Don Gon Do It, it's clear that the winning template that they carved out in 2003 has been dusted off for this new journey into stereophonic sound. Without wanting to paint a vulgar picture, it's balls-out funky-assed pop-rock in the most strenuous sense.

Title track Pieces of the People We Love is a melodious meander with its roots in a drum beat enthused with the spirit of My Sharona, all tight and twitchy and teasing dance moves out of the lifeless limbs of passers-by.

Get Myself Into It is like a disco groove as belted out by Robert Smith and standout track Whoo! Alright, Yeah, Uh Huh is more jerky disco rock with a delightful call-and-response refrain.

There's a gear change in softer songs such as Calling Me, proving that hi-energy is not their only setting and, the maturity of the vocal on The Sound gives the lie to doubters of the band's breakout pop-funk smash House of Jealous Lovers.

The party line is that The Rapture are having way too much fun to care whether or not they're cool.

Listening to the hip sounds on this record, it's hard to believe that it's a by-product of the in-studio hilarity that their press speaks of.

But it's not important. They are cool and when their music is this much fun, who cares if it's studied?