two bitter kids from a bunch of sour grapes
i'm a little bit angry with pitchforkmedia's assessment of the new rapture album and the new mars volta. for the volta they are predictably smug and snarky, oh well. as for the rapture they are goddamn creamin their jeans over this unremarkable, indistinguishable dance-punk pap. damnski...
so to level my 2 cents i'm going to here publish MY review of the Rapture's new album, Pieces of the People we Love. and i think its clear how i feel about the volta. complaints and comments are welcome and encouraged as i should be called on my shit (thats a big part of why i am doing this blog thang) maybe i'm wy off base, it has happened before, and maybe highly derivative dance music is more valuable than crazy indulgent psycho latin flavored prog-metal punk. i dont know, could be
here it is
I want to like the new album by the Rapture. Pieces of the People We Love is funky and danceable and pretty much catchy as the Bloc Party is long. But that’s about all the praise I can muster. I think my complaints can be best summed up in the title of one of the new songs, Whoo! Alright-Yeah…Uh-Huh. I didn’t add the exclamation. The problem with the Rapture’s funky good-times is they all come off about that forced.
The upbeat movers, and there are almost an exhaustive number, are competently executed. Everything sounds pristinely placed and compressed and if the texture is pretty uniform its pleasant anyway. The opening track, Don Gon Do It, immediately calls to mind Duran Duran and is only the first example of the drummer’s lead fist at the cowbell. Then the chorus is a little too closely cut from a Parliament hit. Pastiche is a tough game for the nouveau new-wavers and all the quotation on this record should have endnotes.
The single, Get Myself Into It, has a bass line unfortunately similar to Your Cover’s Blown, Belle & Sebastian’s vastly superior excursion into disco-funk. That band tossed off a tasteful b-side experiment with plenty of pop savvy. The Rapture plods through stilted verse delivery only to repeat the title a lot over a dreadfully honking sax. This is not the only swipe at Squeeze or Orange Juice flavored pop but it is indicative of the success elsewhere.
Lyrically the whole thing’s pretty much a disaster. Even in the very forgiving realm of rock music Luke Jenner (is he still the singer?) sounds about as sharp as a pencil eraser. You’ll cringe when he rhymes blunt with cunt but only because it’s such an obvious attempt at sass. When he brags about his “mustang Ford” or doing the “milkshake shimmy” it’s a little too much. Does the latter reference the Kelis hit? Do we need to further that song’s tepid appeal? You half expect First Gear to describe a doomed cruise around Dead Man’s Curve, but that would constitute joking self-consciousness and would render the bravado so much more forgivable. Clocking in at over six minutes the track could use some levity, or any lyrical dynamic at all.
Certainly a facet of the trouble for Pieces comes from its attempt at rock credibility. The album does not want to be confined to the dance-floor and thus the clumsiest moments are the couple times the band reins in its swagger. Callin Me should be coupled with Jet’s Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is for their shameless and awkward biting of Jack White’s upper register. An ironic moment occurs in the mellow closer Live In Sunshine, which has the band reminiscing the melody of the Butthole Surfers’ Pepper. The Rapture’s take is nowhere near as lyrically interesting and the synthesizer’s appeals finally just sound grating. Even through the repetitions of “live in sunshine” this sounds pretty dismal.
The Rapture is not cool in an original sense. They are sort of like the Fonz of the new-wave revival, and frankly Happy Days may be an accurate way to frame this album’s importance. It is a bizarre homage to a decade we are not yet far enough removed from to really assess but desperately nostalgic for. It’s silly and cliché and a lot of people are going to love it. To me it seems that for dance music to be truly enjoyable outside of a club setting it requires an effortless self-awareness. It needs endless hooks and enchanting rhythms. But it also needs as much tongue in its cheek as spring in its step. With a more balanced approach I think Pieces of the People We Love could have been a solid album. As it is I’m just realizing how right those other dance-punk dandies were when they told us we could have it so much better.
i'm a little bit angry with pitchforkmedia's assessment of the new rapture album and the new mars volta. for the volta they are predictably smug and snarky, oh well. as for the rapture they are goddamn creamin their jeans over this unremarkable, indistinguishable dance-punk pap. damnski...
so to level my 2 cents i'm going to here publish MY review of the Rapture's new album, Pieces of the People we Love. and i think its clear how i feel about the volta. complaints and comments are welcome and encouraged as i should be called on my shit (thats a big part of why i am doing this blog thang) maybe i'm wy off base, it has happened before, and maybe highly derivative dance music is more valuable than crazy indulgent psycho latin flavored prog-metal punk. i dont know, could be
here it is
I want to like the new album by the Rapture. Pieces of the People We Love is funky and danceable and pretty much catchy as the Bloc Party is long. But that’s about all the praise I can muster. I think my complaints can be best summed up in the title of one of the new songs, Whoo! Alright-Yeah…Uh-Huh. I didn’t add the exclamation. The problem with the Rapture’s funky good-times is they all come off about that forced.
The upbeat movers, and there are almost an exhaustive number, are competently executed. Everything sounds pristinely placed and compressed and if the texture is pretty uniform its pleasant anyway. The opening track, Don Gon Do It, immediately calls to mind Duran Duran and is only the first example of the drummer’s lead fist at the cowbell. Then the chorus is a little too closely cut from a Parliament hit. Pastiche is a tough game for the nouveau new-wavers and all the quotation on this record should have endnotes.
The single, Get Myself Into It, has a bass line unfortunately similar to Your Cover’s Blown, Belle & Sebastian’s vastly superior excursion into disco-funk. That band tossed off a tasteful b-side experiment with plenty of pop savvy. The Rapture plods through stilted verse delivery only to repeat the title a lot over a dreadfully honking sax. This is not the only swipe at Squeeze or Orange Juice flavored pop but it is indicative of the success elsewhere.
Lyrically the whole thing’s pretty much a disaster. Even in the very forgiving realm of rock music Luke Jenner (is he still the singer?) sounds about as sharp as a pencil eraser. You’ll cringe when he rhymes blunt with cunt but only because it’s such an obvious attempt at sass. When he brags about his “mustang Ford” or doing the “milkshake shimmy” it’s a little too much. Does the latter reference the Kelis hit? Do we need to further that song’s tepid appeal? You half expect First Gear to describe a doomed cruise around Dead Man’s Curve, but that would constitute joking self-consciousness and would render the bravado so much more forgivable. Clocking in at over six minutes the track could use some levity, or any lyrical dynamic at all.
Certainly a facet of the trouble for Pieces comes from its attempt at rock credibility. The album does not want to be confined to the dance-floor and thus the clumsiest moments are the couple times the band reins in its swagger. Callin Me should be coupled with Jet’s Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is for their shameless and awkward biting of Jack White’s upper register. An ironic moment occurs in the mellow closer Live In Sunshine, which has the band reminiscing the melody of the Butthole Surfers’ Pepper. The Rapture’s take is nowhere near as lyrically interesting and the synthesizer’s appeals finally just sound grating. Even through the repetitions of “live in sunshine” this sounds pretty dismal.
The Rapture is not cool in an original sense. They are sort of like the Fonz of the new-wave revival, and frankly Happy Days may be an accurate way to frame this album’s importance. It is a bizarre homage to a decade we are not yet far enough removed from to really assess but desperately nostalgic for. It’s silly and cliché and a lot of people are going to love it. To me it seems that for dance music to be truly enjoyable outside of a club setting it requires an effortless self-awareness. It needs endless hooks and enchanting rhythms. But it also needs as much tongue in its cheek as spring in its step. With a more balanced approach I think Pieces of the People We Love could have been a solid album. As it is I’m just realizing how right those other dance-punk dandies were when they told us we could have it so much better.
posted by vw at 9:23 AM
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