December 6, 2002

Rapture : London ICA

The best band of 2003, perhaps - even if we still don't know when they're joking.

This far away from the glamorous gutters of The Rapture are. Artrock hearsay suggests a brittle reconfiguration of funk and post-punk, though The Cure have also been mentioned, cautiously. None of it, however, is useful preparation for these four men with turbulent clouds of hair and devastating modernist cheekbones.

Because here's the bassist in a Mickey Mouse t-shirt, leading The Rapture through 'Louie Louie', last resort of rock'n'roll underachievers for some 40 years. 'Louie Louie' as rewritten by Public Image Limited, admittedly. But still, you get the point.

In the circumstances, the easy option would be to pigeonhole The Rapture as bone-dry ironists, working hard to subvert concepts of cool while staying frighteningly cool themselves. That's complicated, though, by exactly how great 'Louie Louie' sounds: wired, desperate, somehow incredibly tight and incredibly loose simultaneously.

The Rapture do this all the time, making a kind of disciplined and unruly music for both dancing and posing. The much-discussed early '80s fetish is unavoidable, as the astounding 'House Of Jealous Lovers' wraps up manic, bleached rhythms in razor-wire guitars. But there are other influences at work too, like the testy clang of Fugazi on 'Modern Romance', or some needling meta-funk that recalls the first Happy Mondays album.

Oh, and glam rock, since The Rapture encore with 'Rock'n'Roll Part 2' by Gary Glitter. Gary Glitter! Like most else about the group - and we haven't even mentioned the hopping man in a headband who juggles saxophone and cowbell - it's absurd in theory, but urgent, taste-redefining and utterly compelling in practice. The best band of 2003, perhaps - even if we still don't know when they're joking.

John Mulvey