The Rapture

‘Echoes’

DFA/ Universal

When Public Enemy kindly asked us in 1988 that we not believe “the hype,” it was hard not to. With “It’ll Take a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back,” they had perfected an art form (hip-hop) and taken the cynical street knowledge of Grandmaster Flash to furious new heights. It wasn’t long before the media tried to paint them as violent, gun-toting, anti-white, anti-Semitic drug-dealing thugs.

However, like the much more undiplomatic gangster rap that followed, they were not merely capitalizing on their own incendiary knack for inspiring racial tension. Rather, they, like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King before them, were bringing to the surface the tension that had always existed in devastated black communities, now being told that the Civil Rights Movement had ended and the playing field had been leveled.

The Rapture have more in common with Public Enemy then you may think. After a frenzy of initial hype, much of the press and indie intelligentsia has already turned its backs on the band once poised to save music. Rather than attack the band’s character or even their music, critics find it more fitting to harp on their own constructed wave of publicity. It’s almost as if the dread of anticipation for the release of the now nearly two year old “Echoes” single handedly loaded the bullets in the gun to kill off any chances of The Rapture surviving the 21st century in anything but a ‘whatever-happened-to’ list.

However, as “Echoes” may prove to fans of their earlier work, The Rapture are full of surprises. Like Public Enemy did before them, this incredible album can stand as the pinnacle of an art form. What exactly is the art form this time around? Disco-punk? Indie Funk House? ElectroGlam? Who knows, but “Echoes” effectively does Robert Smith better than A Guy Called Gerald, Donna Summer better than Public Image Limited, the Psychedelic Furs better than The Neptunes and the Stone Roses better than The Rapture. If none of this makes any sense, just listen to the album.

In The Rapture’s short but sweet oeuvre of music, there have been hints of boogie manifesting since their first single in 1998. Apparently transformed by Rickey Vincent’s book “Funk,” vocalist Luke Jenner gradually turned the rest of the band on to disco and house music while the band was still twiddling broken strings in grimy New York City apartments. This makeover culminated in last year’s frequently mentioned but seldom heard “House of Jealous Lovers” (which was only released as a 12 inch vinyl single).

“House of Jealous Lovers” was an anomaly. Something about the Duran Duran bassline and those jittery guitars struck a chord inside the city that never sleeps. It must have been an awkward moment when those first indie rock kids, like the gaggle of pogoing Sex Pistols audience members in “24 Hour Party People,” started dancing and made New York rock music more exciting to shake shake shake shake shake shake to than all of techno’s bloodless history combined. But The Rapture were not just giving kids a forum to break free from the absurd floor-gazing nausea of elitist underground music. They were, like P.E., freeing the tension that had always existed in these disenfranchised kids, so backed up from the tissue shortage ensuing the latest emo craze, so bruised and battered from a fragmented hardcore scene, so tired of seeing electronic genres fade with the tides.

There is much on “Echoes” to make dance floors for the next few years a more exhilarating place to be, like the album opener “Olio” (here appearing in its third version). “Olio” brushes eery synths along crying piano while a driving dance beat makes all the darkness somewhat inhabitable. The sound is reputably bleak, slick and vibrant, with the electronics lying somewhere between modernity, Casio, and 808. Luke Jenner wails like Disintegration era Robert Smith if Smith wasn’t drowned by reverb and had been grooving more to Derrick May than Siouxie Sioux. Compared to the fractured no wave-lite on their last synthless EP “Out of the Races and Onto the Tracks,” this song breathes in fresh air and draws out sanguine gasps at every turn.

This comes courtesy of newfound superstar production duo DFA, who are like New York’s version of the Neptunes (oh, and plans to work with Britney Spears are in the works). That is, if The Neptunes had the acumen enough to name themselves after a Crispy Ambulance song. Collectively, the duo of James Lavelle and Tim Goldsworthy function as the fifth and sixth members of the band. They are as integral to team Rapture as Mattie Safer’s shakedown bass, or Gabe Andruzzi’s persistent cymbals.

There’s something profound about “Echoes” that is hard to point a hype-weary finger at. Whether it will have the grasp of a “Nevermind” or a “Nation of Millions” is for the 21st century to decide, but there’s something underlying those anxious harmonizing “oooohs” in the amazing breakdown of “Heaven” that anticipates a flood coming.

Kids on Napster, Kazaa, and Soulseek have already proved that they can create their own current of musical energy outside of the prescribed rubbish that the music industry has been feeding us ever since they claimed that Seven Mary Three grew out of the same tree as Nirvana. In this world, The Rapture are already superstars, with their rare insound promotional CDs being traded with the same regularity as those juicy shit-quality AVIs of the Matrix Revolutions and with the same integrity as kids and their rookie baseball cards. Love it or leave it, expect “Echoes” to flood the market with both remarkably solid material and pale imitations in the same milieu.

By the third song on the album, The Rapture have pulled their second or third fast one on you. “Open Up Your Heart” is a gorgeous ballad that could have provided the perfect ender for Lou Reed’s “Transformer” or perhaps this album. Instead, some Martin Hannett-esque psychotic genius decided to put it within the first third of the album. Amazingly enough, it works so good that it’s hard to imagine the band placing the song anywhere else. There’s no real easy way to describe what happens at this point that can justify how The Rapture have let the dancing stop and allowed their blistering goth caterwauls to transcend to sentimental longing. I like to think of it as The Rapture’s way of saying “Listen up. We’re not dancing here because we’re mindless slaves to a corporate beat. We’re doing it because we’re free. This is our world and our music.”

Countless DJs from Playgroup to 2 Many DJs to Northampton’s own Burn Down the Disco have begun fusing “House of Jealous Lovers” (which appears in a new version on “Echoes”) into broader playlists that run the gamut of pop music from Michael Jackson to Missy Elliot. It is not hard to imagine new tracks like the arpeggiated synth-driven “Sister Savior” or the stabbing bass-led “Killing” soon becoming incorporated into those same set lists.

With “Echoes,” The Rapture have created a rock and roll gem that sounds more like the fusion of 1983 and 2013 than one of the best albums of 2003, which it undeniably is.