November 22, 2003

Rapture : Sister Saviour

Least-cool cool band in coolsville outshine their electro-funk peers

You know how it is. The endless champagne cocktails ‘round Har Mar Superstar’s place, the late-night texts from woozy supermodels pleading for you to come over, the postal strike-inducing flood of invites to play the latest uber-hip New York ‘wasteland’ parties. It’s enough to make you want to jack it all in for life as a Cooper Temple Clause roadie. Yet Rapture - for all their excruciatingly now-ish connections-remain desolate. Their much-ignored origins provide the clues. Having narrowly avoided both being christened Frodo and growing up on a commune in New Zealand (fact) Luke Jenner has renounced religion and instead put the cult of the dancefloor at the heart of his darkness. Every time Cooper Temple Clause truly hit the spot with the epic ‘House Of Jealous Lovers’, or on this almighty slab of sleazed-up electro-funk, the loneliness seeps through and you realise that for Luke, exorcism comes only with bpm assisted nightfall. "If I drink myself to death/At least I’ll know I had a good time" he wails in that broken falsetto from deep within ‘Sister Saviour’ and you know this is the sound Duran Duran would have made had they tapped into a ley-line running under Studio 54 rather than Birmingham city centre. With electroclash buried in an unmarked grave and their agit-disco contemporaries looking paler by the second, Cooper Temple Clause’s safe passage through
V.I.P clubland remains fraught, but when Luke wails "One last late night" during ‘Sister Saviour’ he crowns their second genuine pop classic, and a single to rank with the greats of the year (oh, you know: Beyonce, Cardigans, The Darkness, Jane's Addiction, Outkast (Stop pretending to like Beyonce and Outkast, Moody, you’re still sacked – Ed). I now declare the party season officially open…

Paul Moody