Gloriously more than the sum of their parts, New York punk-funkers The Rapture alchemise their seemingly unoriginal constituent parts into a riotous whole.
'Echoes' opener 'Olio' is a case in point: its laughably simple individual elements - Luke Jenner's strangled yowl, production team DFA's basic (to say the least) 808 drum programming, a naively repeated piano motif - somehow coalesce into a melancholy acid epic, a lost warehouse classic by way of The Smiths.
This is what makes The Rapture the most exciting band around right now. Their songs seem constantly on the verge of collapse, shooting out in different directions, cramming in knowing references to the past, genre-hopping, aiming for the most dissolute groove. Yet they somehow pull it all together, nowhere more so than on the track that brought them to our attention all those months ago, 'House Of Jealous Lovers'.
In a year when house died an over-produced, saccharine death, '...Jealous Lovers' had us all falling in love with disco again. It brought the looseness and the gang mentality of a live band to the music, elements which (other than a few of the electroclashers like Fischerspooner) have been sorely missing from the scene. And, thrillingly, it ransacked the sound of an oft-maligned genre - the death disco of the likes of PiL, Gang Of Four and late '70s Bowie - and proved there was still potential to be fulfilled.
Luckily, 'Echoes' proves it wasn't a one-off, with the title track and the stand-out moment of get-to-the-podium genius 'I Need Your Love' both proving this lot would have been Paradise Garage faves. But what makes The Rapture really special is that they can't be defined - the album swaggers elegantly from the punk-funk we recognise, to melancholy Bowie-tinged ballads like 'Open Up Your Heart', to Happy Mondays-ish drug disco like 'Sister Saviour', to skinny-tied NYC pop like 'Love Is All'.
Sonically, they hardly ever strike a false note; and if Jenner's abstract lyrics don't quite strike at the soul, these cut-up soundbites nonetheless suit his band's repetitive, groove-driven music. Nowhere more so than on 'Love Is All', where the title is bawled over and over through a haze of reverb until it sounds like the most profound statement ever.
It's a tricky thing to let simple truths resonate without having them collapse into clichés; but everything - from Jenner's yelp, to the angular guitar slashes and pounding rhythms that surround him - is so dynamic that you barely notice that nothing particularly profound is being said.
Almost by accident, it seems, The Rapture have pulled it off: the album of the year.
by Christian Ward