'I don't like nostalgia," Lou Reed once said, "unless it's mine." Fitting words from the Velvet Underground singer and icon of the proto-punk movement, whose influence is evident in countless New York indie bands now considered, ironically, cutting-edge. Take The Rapture, for instance, a group whose buzz is louder than the locusts swarming the East Coast this summer. Though not strictly a nostalgia act, they have developed a knack for lifting hit-worthy hooks from old funk and disco tunes, and applying them to their own modern post-punk aggression. If their expanding fan base is any indication, the hybrid works. Velvet Lou might even approve.The band was recently in the thick of a European tour, a seemingly nonstop series of venues, in-store appearances and late-night parties. They're still riding the momentum of their newest album, Echoes, while anticipating the momentum that's already been building around a more recent development — the band was awarded a much-coveted spot in the lineup for The Cure's summer tour, dubbed Curiosa.
So it's no surprise that bassist Mattie Safer sounds a little distracted, if not annoyed, at doing yet another interview. He's also unequivocal about music journalists — he doesn't like them.
"There's very little for me to read about music that's interesting," Safer tells me. "Especially given what's now available; bands get attention who don't deserve it. Or else," he says, referring to Brit publication Mojo, "it's just lots of reissue stuff."
Reissues — isn't that all the past couple years of rock music has been? Especially this summer, where dino-rock bands and their emulators are the ones making cash on the concert circuit. (To wit, seven of this week's Top 10 touring acts have been around for more than 20 years. Van Halen is No. 1 — I didn't even know Hagar had returned … .) The Cure, one of the seven bands on the list, hasn't embarked on a tour in four years. During that time, The Rapture have matured, honed their sound, and become marginalized as knockoffs of The Cure.
"The comparisons are right to an extent, but at the same time, that's lazy journalism," Safer contends, again jabbing the Fourth Estate. True enough. However tempting it is to characterize The Cure as a benevolent granny watching over her brood, distinctions are necessary. Most important of these: The Rapture is a band interested in making dance music, however dissimilar it is to the embarrassingly fluffy disco clogging most of the FM airwaves, or the gothy beatmongers with whom they're normally associated, or the thump-heavy grooves of rap's ever-changing Next Big Thing.
Rather, The Rapture have been described as "electro-punk," "dance punk," "disco punk" and other newly minted classifications. They've also been credited for bridging a creative gap between indie rock — where audiences are notoriously judgmental to the point of stoicism — and techno, where kids choose hip-shaking over thesauruses. Alternately jarring and smooth, they currently have a monopoly on a widely ignored fanbase: people who want to dance, but without the hackneyed, synthetic beats found in most New York clubs.
Other rock acts have bridged this gap successfully — and not necessarily The Cure. High-profile groups such as the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and David Bowie led their more rock-oriented audiences into previously unheard-of territories of funk and R&B. Echoes attempts the same feat by mimicking the soul of Stevie Wonder (examples: "Sister Saviour" and the omnipresent club hit of 2002, "House of Jealous Lovers") and the post-punk of Gang of Four, while yes, admittedly repackaging The Cure's morose wailings.
It's easy to imagine The Rapture, clad in long white lab coats, developing a precision-timed formula to get the kids hooked. Safer denies the assumption: "It wasn't like we were existing outside of any scene. Dance music is something we wanted to be a part of. It's what we were excited about in the first place."
The "first place" is a hard destination to identify, especially considering this band's roots (or lack thereof). Singer Luke Jenner and drummer Vito Roccoforte, childhood friends from San Diego, founded The Rapture in San Francisco in 1998. That scene, described by Safer as "clique-y" and "one-dimensional," spawned another move, this time up the coast to Seattle. That didn't pan out, and in less than a year they booked a one-way tour to New York. Safer and multi-instrumentalist Gabe Andruzzi, who had seen The Rapture play in their hometown of Washington, D.C., later joined the band after the original bassist left.
It's ironic that these guys would skip from one town to another in search of a "fit," only to find it in a town where comparatively little was going on. Safer contends that, far from supporting new artists, the Big Apple was actually a creative wasteland (bear in mind, this was pre-Strokes). "There was nothing like what it is now," he says, cautiously adding, "I just hope it doesn't get as desperate as it was before."
That's doubtful, considering the profusion of indie rock groups currently emerging from that same scene. The synergy created over the past two years has brought more attention to the New York scene than we've seen since, well, the last explosion of New York bands.
"But now," warns Safer, "the backlash is starting. A&R people are telling bands not to say they're from New York." To him, a "New York band" is fast becoming known as one that matures too soon and couldn't possibly live up to the hype surrounding it. By contrast, he notes, The Rapture arrived in town penniless, began booking their own shows, and got a couple of lucky breaks along the way.
At 23, he sounds like an elder statesman lecturing to his constituency.
"There were a surprising number of good bands coming out around the same time, which led to a number of crappy bands getting signed in a short time," he says, adding snidely, "everybody has a manager, but they don't need one."
So while The Rapture experiences a glut of exposure now, he notes, it's only the result of years of steady growth. Recognizing this, Safer concludes, "We were blessed that we could lock ourselves inside a studio where everyone outside didn't care, but we thought we were changing the world."
Contact Music Writer Mark Sanders at 941-906-7476, or mark.sanders@ weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in Jul 22-28, 2004.