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The Rapture - Echoes

Details

Format: CD
Catalog: 128302
Rel. Date: 10/21/2003
UPC: 602498654477

Echoes
Artist: The Rapture
Format: CD
New: Currently Unavailable New Used: Currently Unavailable
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Reviews:

The Rapture began as a noise-punk trio from Washington, D.C., in the late '90s, but by the time they recorded Out of the Races and Onto the Tracks for Sub Pop in 2001, they were clearly onto something else. The EP's title track's guitar shards and yelped vocal rode a four-four disco drumbeat that wavered but demonstrated their interest in going a lot further than their scruffy beginnings. Then, a year later, they released the shockingly assured "House of Jealous Lovers," a 12-inch single on New York indie label DFA. Seamlessly lacing a DJ-ready near-house groove (complete with cowbell) with raw, snarling guitars and Luke Jenner's yelping vocal, the song was a conscious dance-rock revival meeting that took the Gang of Four's agit-funk to the acid house and made you want to breakdance, slam-dance, play air guitar, and wave a glowstick while tripping out of your mind, all at once.

On Echoes, the Rapture, who are now a quartet, make good on that middle ground by assiduously working both ends of it. The disc resembles a reverse-negative Screamadelica, only with Primal Scream's "Movin' on Up" optimism replaced by a tense, wary-eyed "goin' down slow." Jenner's nobody's idea of a great singer, but he makes ballads like "Open Up Your Heart" and "Love Is All" work by sounding unnerved, ready to crack apart; when the band (aided, as on "Jealous Lovers," by producers Tim Goldsworthy and James Murphy) break into the bubbling electro-house abstractionism of "I Need Your Love," it's a relief, and a trip. And "Heaven" and "Echoes," the latter of which flat-out rips off Public Image Ltd.'s "Careering," show a rock band as assured as any out there right now.
        
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