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Music reviews |
The Rapture - Echoes
A few disco-punk high points, but too many failed experiments drag down the record.
Universal
Release date: 9/30/03
Rating: C-1. Olio 5:20
2. Heaven 3:47
3. Open Up Your Heart 5:22
4. I Need Your Love 4:39
5. The Coming of Spring 2:42
6. House of Jealous Lovers 5:04
7. Echoes 3:06
8. Killing 3:37
9. Sister Savior 3:51
10. Love Is All 4:26
11. Infatuation 5:01A few things jump out at you when you first play Echoes, the second full-length CD from Brooklyn’s The Rapture.
Most songs appear to be sprawling, barely held-together cacophonies of synthesizer noises, drum machines, prominent bass and angular guitar riffs ranging from fuzzy to jangly. Accidental notes (sharps and flats) pop up when you expect naturals. The funk-punk edges are exaggerated by the DFA’s (stands for “death from above”) Steve Albini-esque production. (Indeed, a debt is owed here to Albini’s pioneering but difficult-to-listen-to band Big Black, as well as to other 80s innovators like Gang of Four, Bauhaus and the early Cure.)
The lyrics are none too deep, particularly a repeated penchant for counting (“One, two, three, four, kick that fucker out the door!” vocalist Luke Jenner yowls on “Killing.” Huh!?) And throughout, Jenner’s out-of-tune, Robert Smith yelp is the most annoying voice this side of Neutral Milk Hotel’s Jeff Magnum.
Only a few songs here reward repeated listens, but those few are quite good. “House of Jealous Lovers,” which as a 2002 single was a dance-club smash, is great fun, with a killer beat accentuated by syncopated cowbell and Matt Safer’s “Two Hearts Beat As One” bassline. “Heaven” (which unfortunately opens with still more counting) is saved by the lyric-less guitar-and-drum clanging that makes up the song’s second half. “The Coming of Spring” is one of the album’s tighter songs – Jenner even holds the tune. “Sister Saviour” would have been a great Depeche Mode song in 1985.
The second-to-last track, “Love is All,” stands out perpendicularly from everything else on Echoes. After nine songs of goth-disco-punk-whatever, The Rapture show themselves capable of producing a pretty good power-pop tune, which a sunny, infectious guitar part, that cowbell again, and an appealing psychedelic fade-out. Less forced and more natural in feel than the rest of the album, “Love is All” leaves an impression that this is the type of music The Rapture would rather be playing, if the need to be a “buzz band” hadn’t forced them to add all those drum machines and atonal melodies.
Despite these flashes of real talent, Echoes still lacks tracks that you’d want to play for a friend and say “listen to this!” The rest of the album is a morass of mediocre tracks. “I Need Your Love,” for instance, sounds like warmed-over house music most appropriate for background music at your local Old Navy or Abercrombie store. “Infatuation” is the sort brooding dirge that Thom Yorke does many times better. The title track “Echoes” doesn’t hold together, especially as Jenner screams his way through the last half-minute.
Some songs descend to the level of truly awful. The opener “Olio,” with a canned drum track and a repeated, unmelodic synth line, sounds like someone noodling with the cheap display keyboard at Radio Shack. The third track, “Open Up Your Heart,” is simply horrible. I won’t bother to describe it to you (it’s slow…). I just defy you to listen to it all the way through more than once.
Echoes is very uneven; pulling out its best moments is a bit like going on an Easter-egg hunt. But I wouldn’t consider the record a failure. To the band’s enormous credit, the Rapture can’t be accused of crass commercialism or of being in a creative rut. Though they borrow heavily from the post-punk bands of twenty years ago, they are not averse to experimentation. They’re trying lots of things at once – disco, punk, art-rock, even something resembling pop.
The trouble is, not all of what they try works, and they seem unable to distinguish the brilliant from the unlistenable, and to leave the latter off the album.
