Monday morning: Hair dryers whir, clock radios blare, breakfast pastries are unwrapped and somewhere, someone, hairbrush in hand, is dancing in his underwear in front of a mirror to The Rapture.
Today, a bookish roommate leaves to do work at the library, leaving the other roommate no choice but to celebrate. Click, click. iTunes opens. Click, click. On comes The Rapture.
Perhaps Tufts hasn't exactly been as taken by storm by the four-piece New York City disco punk-funk fusion band as these scenarios suggest, but trust the reviewer: It's only a matter of time before The Rapture becomes the next version of The Strokes.
Although not native to the New York dance-punk scene, The Rapture easily made the transition from a raw sub-pop indie band to an electro-punk "it" band with the help of the DFA Records production team (James Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy) in the late '90s.
Although singer Luke Jenners claims that DFA "saw a potential in them that no one else did," it was obvious that the band's reaction to the music we listened to in middle school would have taken them places anyway, far beyond a pair of waxy ear buds stuck in some college kid's head on the subway.
Some believe that The Rapture will never outdo their hit single, "House of Jealous Lovers" off their major-label debut, "Echoes" (2003), and they might be right. But 2006's "Pieces of the People We Love," produced by Paul Epworth, Ewan Pearson and Danger Mouse (of Gnarls Barkley fame) is hardly a sophomore slump. Like a student who enters his first science fair on a whim one year and ends up winning, only to enter again the second year and get fifth, The Rapture might currently be receiving outstanding reviews for their latest album if it wasn't for their first.
"Pieces of the People We Love" fades in with five bass-synth chords like a spaceship of church choir singers landing. Crisp, clear and so club-friendly, "Don Gon Do It" proves that Jenners does what The Killers' Brandon Flowers can't: sing - really sing. And it's a good thing he can, too, because without his Sting/Jack White voice, the grand opening chorus would be nothing more than a tired drug clich?© ("High/ High as the sky") sung until its listeners were sober.
Out of necessity, Jenners soars over thumping percussion and miscellaneous hand-claps, wavering deliberately in and out of unison and harmony with back-up vocals and carefully placed synth effects.
"Get Myself Into It," is so mindlessly repetitive that by the time the song is over, it sounds overplayed. The oscillating percussion rhythms are the only saving grace of the song, but it's not like anyone will complain, since the majority of the people listening to it will be dancing too much and hugging too many people to notice.
And so the album continues. As satisfying as it would be to call it on its bluff, it's hard to chastise a piece of work clearly created out of the spirit of fun and dance. We all want to look for meaning in music, but sometimes we must accept that music doesn't have to be about anything except rhythmically shaking and jiggling body parts.
During "The Devil," Jenners' breathing and moaning rivals that of Britney Spears' in "I'm a Slave 4 U." When Britney did it, scenesters mocked her for so blatantly marketing her vapid sexuality. But now that a band in the New York music scene is singing about the same things Spears did, it's suddenly acceptable for the nay-sayers to shimmy and sway like nothing's wrong.
It's fun. It's catchy. It's revived disco with pop inside. It's The Rapture, and it's exactly that: musical ecstasy. Sure, the lyrics are so irritatingly redundant that you'll wonder at times if your CD is stuck, but once you accept that dance-punk is about anything but the lyrics, you might feel something pounding at your toes and look down and realize that they're tapping.
