Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 18/09/06
Label: Mercury

On "Whoo! Alright-Yeah…Uh Huh", the high-point of The Rapture's second album, Mattie Safer declares: "I used to think life a bitter pill but it's a grand old time." A fitting announcement for a record whose chief flaw appears to be a rather one-dimensional insistence on the good times.

Progenitors of punk-funk and largely responsible - along with then co-pilots the DFA - for spawning much of the current indie disco landscape, populated by the likes of New Young Pony Club, Good Books, Klaxons even, The Rapture deliver a slick version of the sound on "Pieces Of The People We Love". Largely produced by current UK darling Paul Epworth, whose stop-start dynamic has added poise to everyone from The Futureheads, The Rakes and Bloc Party, this project seems like a passing of the punk-funk baton from New York to London. Aided by Ewan Pearson, Epworth has delivered an accessible set of indie disco, far more easily digestible than the DFA's 10-minute dancefloor epics.

Fittingly, The Rapture have shed the last remnants of their glacial post-punk posturing and dived headlong into a celebration of party grooves, with vacuous lyrical content as standard. Quite why they printed the words to songs as inexcusably inane as "First Gear" - like a No Wave version of a number from "Grease" about cruising the town in a Ford Mustang - is anyone's guess. In case Epworth proved too hip to deliver the singles, Mercury also drafted in Danger Mouse, fresh from Gnarls Barkley glories, and his title track is a shoo in for next single. Featuring Cee-Lo, it wouldn't sound out of place on "St. Elsewhere". All of which reinforces the always-lingering suspicion that The Rapture are as much a conduit for their producers' visions as they are masters of their own.

"Whoo! Alright-Yeah…Uh Huh" provides the album highlight because it actually has something to say. Full of bile, Safer lashes out at the girl that accuses him of writing "crap rock poetry" and almost goes as far as fingering the numbing corporate haul of the promotional circuit as "the reason we're so uninspired." "A party ain't great 'cos the booze is free," he suggests, recalling the wired party-after-the-night-before edginess that elevated "Echoes" tracks like "House Of Jealous Lovers" and "Love Is All". But, as the album drifts to a close with the psyche-lite "Live In Sunshine", the sheer anonymity of the whole project leaves this a hard record to love.

    by James Poletti