merrily popping bass of "The Devil" approach that elusive concept known as "groove." As with Echoes, Luke Jenner helps the songs he sings drop their inhibitions with his loose-hinged voice, building to a fake-orgasm crescendo on "The Devil" that's absurd yet logical. The idea that one can, you know, actually dance to the Rapture is sometimes mocked, but tracks such as the sharp, sax-supplemented "Get Myself Into It" and the delirious Afro-funk guitar vs. It's impressive then, that even with this newfound attention to detail, the Rapture still maintain a flailing energy and enthusiasm that most of the other dancepunk bands could only fake. While nothing on Pieces reaches the velveteen club-readiness of "I Need Your Love", the band's previous muddy immediacy is replaced by a more meticulous approach: the keyboards polished to a glossy sheen, the guitars eased back into a supporting role, percussion real and programmed blended seamlessly. What the Rapture have returned with is a sound less concerned with retaining the raw, gritty punk half of the equation: From the fade-in harmonies and discrete four notes of bass-synth that announce the album, it's clear the group is going for a cleaner sound, surely helped by Paul Epworth and Ewan Pearson, who man the boards for eight of 10 tracks.
Fortunately for the band, Pieces turns out to be a strong (at times even spectacular) album, one that finds the band evolving from where they left off with Echoes while restoring some of the old hope that indie kids have, indeed, learned how to dance, and no longer have to be quite so obvious about it. Even with the three-year vacation, Pieces seems destined to face a tidal wave of righteous anger from those who felt scammed by dancepunk's brief promise, a piƱata to absorb the beatings of the jilted. Into that unwelcome environment comes Pieces of the People We Love, the Rapture's third full-length and very patient followup to Echoes. As the general opinion of the heady dancepunk days of 2003 faded into disdain, the Rapture- as the sound's most-recognized face- took the brunt of the negativity. Meanwhile, dancepunk went on to disintegrate before our very eyes, flaming out even faster than most hastily-classified genres, with nobody digging past the most obvious influences (read: Gang of Four) to do more than echo Echoes. The internet, fickle mistress that it is, began dissipating the aura around the Rapture as quickly as it had conjured it up, with listeners speculating that they were mere puppets for the DFA, or plagiarists of the early 80s, or merely the Emperor's New Hipster Jeans. These flashes of greatness don't quite add up to what could have been, but the album as a whole is still quite exceptional.Then, almost immediately, things began to fall apart. Lastly, opener "Olio" will be pure heaven for those who secretly wished that Chicago house legend Larry Heard would one day swap out Robert Owens in favor of Robert Smith. "The Coming of Spring" is another frantic neo-post-punk slasher, with wonderfully needling guitars cleaved by a Nuggets-worthy breakdown. Nearly toppling their previous best, "I Need Your Love" is propelled by a relentlessly thumping backbeat, an unshakable keyboard vamp, and gurgling keyboards - it's the band's second stroke of indie-dance genius. Another detracting feature is the overuse of Luke Jenner's Robert Smith, which is oftentimes more glaring than Paul Banks' Ian Curtis and Jack White's Robert Plant put together. "Open Up Your Heart," daringly placed as the third track, is a hollow, momentum-killing piano ballad on "Love Is All," multiple Southern boogie elements prove to be a mismatch "Infatuation" closes the album with a murmur. The lesser half nearly chokes the album, as it casts the Rapture as the same rickety band that it was before the rebirth. The wait hasn't paid off, in a sense, because hype turned Echoes into a monolithic event when, in truth, it turns out that only half of it proves "House of Jealous Lovers" to be no fluke. It has, in a sense, because that single seemed like a case of capturing lightning in a bottle - a one-off that would define an otherwise extremely average band - and Echoes ably proves that it was no fluke.
post-punk bands - took hold in the underground, anticipation for this album built, built, and kept on building.
Once "House of Jealous Lovers" - a horrifically mangled jolt with a viscous rhythmic vroom as dynamite as anything from the late-'70s U.K. One 12", produced and released by the DFA, transformed the Rapture from a benign indie band into hot hot sh*t.