Pieces of the Genres We Love

There’s a memo floating around saying that dance-punk is dead, but it looks like The Rapture chose to creatively interpret it. At most, their third album Pieces of the People We Love puts an accent over the “dance” in the term. Detractors may find the results a bit homogenous, but many more fans will appreciate its beginning-to-end consistency.

As much as 2003’s Echoes joined two genres in holy hyphenated matrimony, its screams and shredded guitar made obvious the band’s origins on rock-centric label Sub Pop (in spite of their DFA association). “House of Jealous Lovers” and “Sister Saviour” became indie-tronica benchmarks, yet the album as a whole was a much harder sell. That’s not the case here.

Pieces of the People We Love narrows the band’s focus to beeps and beats, with guitar and sax flourishes in immediate winners like “Get Myself Into It” and “Don Go Do It.” Even the album’s wildest song, “The Sound,” features scratchy riffs, Vito Roccoforte rhythms, and vocal structure recalling Prince’s “Computer Blue” instead of aspiring to be merely the art of noise.

To find the “punk” in The Rapture, check out the lyrics. Sometimes snotty, sometimes nonsensical, Matt Safer and Luke Jenner rail against the fickle hipster community The Rapture helped to build as well as the band’s rather successful position within it. Normally this attitude brings middle fingers from the crowd, but when solid grooves (like those of “Whoo! Alright — Yeah, Uh-Huh…”) meet keen observations (“People don’t dance no more / They just stand there like this”) the kids will be too busy making songs into anthems to realize the middle fingers are instead being pointed at them.