Too bad I was exhausted on Thursday night, shows during weeknights are hard to fully enjoy, but since I had missed them last year at the FYF fest (I had to choose between them and Panda Bear) I could not miss that second chance to see the Rapture.
And it was a hard-dance party from start to finish, a sort of funky-punk riot directed by frontman Luke Jenner’s high-pitch voice and these infectious Vito Roccoforte’s drumbeats. It was most of the time very upbeat music that simply made people happy and jumpy, their faces frozen in smiles during the band rather short set (I think they only played an hour or so), their bodies completely lost and intoxicated in the bouncing rhythms of the synths and drum beats.
I was nevertheless feeling a little like an outsider, not being extremely familiar with their music and their show at the Music Box being my first one, whereas all these people around me had visibly been raptured a few times before. But I was actually captivated by the fact that people were moving far more than the band members, if there was a riot going on it was certainly not on stage, and it was difficult to realize that these funky-shake-the-entire-house pulsating assaults and dance-techno-disco melodies were coming from these quite static guys.
There were a few exceptions, as during the somber ‘Olio’, Luke Jenner did a gentle stage diving (he took some precautions, unlike these crazy hardcore punk rockers!) and swam over the crowd for a few seconds, then wandered among people for a little while before coming back on stage visibly happy, but beside this episode, they were quite tranquil on stage.
The four of them were producing their curious power-dance-electro-pop sound with the only help of regular instruments, like synths, guitar, bass and drums, but Jenner’s screaming-plaintive howl was giving the distinctive tone all along. With these repetitive lyrics and the use of a funky-African-style saxophone played by multi-instrumentalist Gabriel Andruzzi, they were making everyone happy, but when a cowbell made an apparition, it was disco-house time,.. LCD soundsystem style!
They played a mix of their different albums, like their 2003 Echoes’ (‘Olio’, ‘House of Jealous Lovers’, ‘Echoes’), their 2006 ‘Pieces of the People we Love’ (‘The Devil’, ‘Get Myself Into It’) and their recently released ‘In the Grace of Your Love’ (the title song with which they opened the show, ‘Never Die Again’). At one point, people were clapping hands hard, in trance, but Jenner disappeared letting the synths take over for a little while, and they all reappeared for an encore with ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ and ‘Sail Away’.
I have to make a confession, I am a bad customer when it comes to dance music, it’s not what I listen to, I even despise a lot of things that belong to the genre, but it was not the case for the Rapture, there was a hypnotic spell in some of their songs which belong to a genre of their own. The New York band played with such inspired and inspiring conviction, that it was hard to resist to them, even with only a few hours of sleep.