The Rapture: Get Myself Into It

New York’s original post-punks go post-post-punk

More than anyone else, save perhaps friend and past collaborator James Murphy, The Rapture triggered off the post-punk revival that still – through a slew of terrible asymmetrical haircuts and barrel-scraping reissues – shows little sign of abating. So explosive were the shockwaves from their breakthrough single, 2002’s ‘House Of Jealous Lovers’, you can still feel it in any band welding shrill guitars to disco beats from Klaxons to CSS to Kasabian to Shitdisco to, we’d be willing to wager, bits of the new Oasis album. In short, all other bands now sound like The Rapture… except, of course, The Rapture.

Just as the original post-punk cleaned itself up in the early ’80s, better to sneak its insurrectionary subtext into the charts, here The Rapture have softened their edge without – oh yes – losing their edge. On the spacious, funky ‘Get Myself Into It’, the sax soothes instead of shrieks, the beats shuffle instead of broil, and singer/guitarist Luke Jenner – he formerly of the chicken-wire guitar and vocal chords of cut glass – has softened: his quavered vocal now an invitation, rather than an exhortation. On the band’s MySpace page, bassist Mattie Safer called ‘Get Myself Into It’ “the most important song ever made”. Oh sure, lyrically it’s a no-brainer: “Gotta get myself into it/Why not help me do it/It’s a chance in a lifetime”. But sonically, it feels like a glimpse of the next wave before it happens – a sleek, spacious weapon of funk destruction aimed right for the mainstream. In short, still so far ahead of anyone out there.

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