The Rapture
Pieces of the People We Love

Universal 2006

By Hunter Stephenson

Okay, so some of these tracks are moderately catchy, but even Cory K. is hating. As a follow-up to Echoes this is a disposably irritating, fruity 180, made for scrunchy-accessorized dancing and weekend warrior car commercials (and licensed boogie material for Madden ‘07, no less).

The Rapture are a different group now, and not merely due to music critics changing out the prior citing of James Chance, Gang of Four and PiL for this album’s Talking Heads, Prozac and Jack-O sex noises. These guys now embrace (and that’s too fitting a word) a new, premature stance as veterans of the hipster dance-floor, and they want you to know that they like to have a goofy, great, white time. Dancing is now an, umm, half-serious agenda and literal topic in several of their songs a la the Hives or the Agenda, with laments like “People don’t dance no more…” The ellipses serve as markers to an impending cliff of inanity.

Pieces of the People We Love jerks around far, far away from Echoes, the band’s prior album recorded under the neology tutelage of the DFA, and the one that conducted an agog, vatical thunderstorm for rock at the time. It’s needless to say, but “House of Jealous Lovers” effortlessly convinced our nation’s beloved, cliché, hard-to-please Brooklynites in their straight jeans and beer-fists to dance around badly like GIFs of Mr. Burns and everyone mostly followed. It wrought dance punk (Slap! No shit.), was the most important rock album of 2003 with that year’s nicest (and eldest) single and perfectly captured (even if the band didn’t personify) the carefree, ironic fuckuppery of the early ’00s, with generous dashes of cowbell and sax. There were also the album’s blanketed comedowns highlighted by Luke Jenner’s spiraling, creaky withdrawal on ‘Infatuation” and the leaky but endearingly charming “Open Up Your Heart,” that partially snuffed critics’ dance-riding buzz but gave the album a longevity to weather peerlessly amidst the countless imitators that expired on arrival.

None of that needs to be reiterated – so true – unless you hear more than a single off Pieces of the People We Love. A slight chafe from the overbearing groove of optimism is present early on and there’s a machine-like serviceableness – akin to over-produced alternative rock like Foo Fighters and late-era Blur (“Calling Me”) doing disco - that continues to make the proceedings even shittier. “The Sound,” courtesy of the album’s primary producers (if not problems) Paul Epworth and Ewan Pearson, is the type of awful are-they-fucking-scratching-records, epic rock electro farce that would seem to at least have a back-story about "the Chemical Brothers dropping by."

You know the sound; it’s very close to the untouchable, polished mediocrity on modern rock radio that you’ve long forgotten about contemplating. What happened to the Rapture? Somehow, they’ve been pulled into this generic, happy vacuum, part of a non-genre long mutated since they introduced it to magazines and the masses with a disinterested cool. And now they've returned; only to be open-mouthed figuredheads for this current satirfically awful, sophomoric version of it all, fit for showrooms displaying cotton jerseys and the old dude in the club.