Welcome, apparently, to the New York punk-funk revival: The Rapture are its house band, and their ‘02 smash ‘House Of Jealous Lovers’, included here, its national anthem. How odd, then, to discover a total absence of The Funk.
This, if anything, is disco played as if it were punk, or vice versa. There’s no glamour, no easy choruses, no lipglossed Moroder production: no sounds, in fact, that you wouldn’t hear coming out of some dank rehearsal room or cramped lower-east-side home studio. Instead, there are only ragged sounding punk instruments twisted into insane dancefloor shapes – or, to be exact, a kind of motorik, quasi-goth, one-kick-pedal/hi-hat combo-and-the-truth kind of disco, involving lots of dubby, abandoned-warehouse-sized space between all the elements of malevolent, razored noise and several sleepless nights’ worth of filth under the fingernails.
Maybe the reason it works is the same reason other dance/rock collisions have not only worked but electrified pop history: rock and dance might theoretically be opposites, but they’ve been known to be surprisingly willing bedfellows. Hence title track ‘Echoes’’ massed vocals and lurching drums have the same aggressive, this is my manifesto, now dance! spirit as ‘This Is Radio Clash’, and the skinnily threatening ‘Killing’ and ‘Olio’ are a kind of atavistic New Order (landmark dance-rock fusionists themselves) after having not been fed and kept in a dark damp room for three weeks. ‘House Of Jealous Lovers’, meanwhile, is deranged, hilarious and irresistible: you can see why it’s been called the Strokes generation’s ‘Blue Monday’.
Granted, their bashed-up, mucky sound (courtesy of NYC producers DFA) is deeply unfashionable in this age of the Neptunes’ juicily healthy MTV’n’b; and not everyone is going to be able to listen to Luke Jenner’s strangulated Robert Smithian yelp without throwing the stereo, the speakers, the CD cover and anything else that’s to hand against a concrete wall. But don’t hate it ’cos it’s unbeautiful.