Without any urging, those in the crowd at the Rapture’s sold-out Music Hall of Williamsburg show began frantically moving around. There was no sequence or coherence, but it wouldn’t be long before the same people reached for the ceiling, fighting Newton’s Law of Gravity. In the briefest summary, the set was an absolute ripper, a dance show with a rock band playing or maybe it was the other way around. If the Rapture waited five years for this, as they would intimate later in the evening, for this group of fans, the wait seemed to have been even longer.
The Rapture appropriately opened with one of their many songs directly referencing human affection, “In the Grace of Your Love.” Put another way, if your drinking game was to do shots each time frontman Luke Jenner mentioned the word love, you’d either be very drunk or very dead, depending on your tolerance for alcohol. Jenner ended the evening with “It Takes Time to Be a Man”—the closer off the band’s new album and nearly a dead ringer for “Let’s Get It On”—dedicated to his wife of 10 years and perhaps a reflection of how good it feels to be back onstage. This means there were two types of love in play as Jenner stared into the balcony: that of a guy who took off a ton of time from music to spend it with his family and that of a guy who felt completely at home onstage of Music Hall of Williamsburg, a venue that did not exist when his 2006 LP hit stores.
This intersection of the old and the new and the personal and the public played well as the band spent the evening in their more comfortable back catalog with a few new album stunners mixed in for good measure. “House of Jealous Lovers” sat comfortably with “Get Myself Into It,” next to new cuts like the night’s second song, “Never G0nna Die Again,” and main-set closer, the club-ready “How Deep Is Your Love.” That love, clearly a complicated instrument, had waited too long to not be real and the ceiling of Music Hall was way closer than it appeared.
No comments:
Post a Comment