The Singles Jukebox

Shockingly, not everyone is on board with a postpunk yowl.

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Josh Langhoff: In the Grace of Your Love is a great idea for an album: disco as devotional music. Both strive for transcendence, both value surrendering oneself to a greater movement, “love saves the day” is also the message of the Gospel, hands get raised, and on and on. I really WANTED to like this, and I still sort of do — especially four minutes along, the part where everything kicks in together. Unfortunately, Luke Jenner’s adenoids distract; he sounds like Gordon Gano, which reminds me that the Violent Femmes’ gospel stuff works less as worship music than as heartfelt novelty. Besides that, the beat’s too busy, disco and rock piled atop one another instead of winnowed down to their joint essence. Add the careful manner in which the different elements are pieced together, and it all makes transcendence sound like an awful lot of work. Which it is, I’m sure, but this is no way to sell it.
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Brad Shoup: I find the Rapture moves from tolerability to pleasure when they ditch the infernal disco of dance-punk for excursions into older forms. On an album stocked with the latter, this is perhaps the finest: a heartrending garage approximation. The relationship depicted is desperately entwined: lines frequently end with “me” and “you,” and there’s a childish construction to the lyrics, down to the hyperbaton of “the mountains we will climb”. Months later, I’m still not sure how the question of the title functions. The hallelujahs would seem to imply a worshipful declaration, but Vito Roccoforte’s frantic rolls try to single-handedly put his group on the offensive.
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Jonathan Bogart: For all house music’s deep connection to the black gospel tradition, it’s surprisingly rare to hear a great house song express traditionally religious sentiments. There are good solid sociocultural reasons for this — dance music has historically been a place where people who aren’t accepted by traditional religion can congregate and perform their own communal rites, and the utopian universalism of dance precludes anything as divisive as a dogma — but every time I’ve listened to “How Deep Is Your Love” this year I’ve marveled at how perfectly it works as a hymn, and how much would have to change in both churched and unchurched America for it to become one.
[10]

Anthony Easton: “God Is My DJ”-style dance floor ecstasies. My love is deep enough to appreciate the brass, love the percussion and become overjoyed by those crunchy beats. Feels weird to hear this on early Saturday afternoon and not on the dance floor. 
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Edward Okulicz: Taken in a communal setting, it’s easy to imagine this as uplifting and transcendent if not quite spiritual. The singing is worse than a below average man in the street, which is enough to mar, but not ruin its joyous house pulse.
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Katherine St Asaph: You know what sucked about ’90s dance? All those divas who sang better than your snot-throat classmate.
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Alfred Soto: Magnificent house track – the best on the album – and a subpar vocal. If these guys need a singer, check me out every other Saturday at karaoke.  
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Jer Fairall: It has been a few years since I’ve re-watched Michael Tolkin’s 1991 film The Rapture, a deliberately unpleasant and often frustrating drama about sin, sacrifice and spiritual conviction and co-starring an intolerably whiny-voiced child that nevertheless calls out for me to revisit it from time to time. It has been even longer since I tried listening to New York’s post-millenial buzz band The Rapture, an unintentionally unpleasant and frustrating band that mixes dance, punk and rock and fronted by an intolerably whiny-voiced child that nevertheless fails to produce anything that resembles the excitement of any of its combined genres enjoyable. Guess which one I’d rather be doing right now.
[3]

Michelle Myers: Those chunky piano chords are fabulous and I like the part that sounds like the “Thong Song,” but whenever it’s playing I end up having a fight with myself over whether I’d rather be listening to the Bee Gees song or “House of Jealous Lovers.”
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Jonathan Bradley: When the Bee Gees asked this question, it sounded like they expected the only struggle in the answer to be that regarding the difficulty of quantifying the infinite. Luke Jenner seems like he’s desperate to know if it exists at all. House piano is usually designed for uplift, but in the Rapture’s anxious hands, the result is nervy: queasy disco trying to calm unsettled feelings. That’s a clever trick, helped along by a voice that sounds at-edge enough to induce a similar tension in the listener, but it’s not something I want to experience myself, and Jenner doesn’t make himself sympathetic enough that I want to experience it with him.
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Sally O’Rourke: “How Deep is Your Love” is essentially a timeline of the past 35 years of dance music, from the title ripped from the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, to the funk-punk sax skronks and the Chicago house piano, to the Sisqó-biting refrain. But “How Deep is Your Love” is too reverent and adroit to be just a showy gimmick. Instead, it’s a hymn to dance music’s eternal power to heal those who believe, to lend succor through its outsized emotions and grant grace to those who’ve lost themselves in its rhythms.
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Alex Ostroff: Stabby piano dance music with yelpy indie vocals, saxophone, even more saxophone, and, eventually, everything but the kitchen sink is normally right up my alley. Unfortunately, when your discography includes a stone-cold classic, my brain tends to grade on a curve.
[9]

Iain Mew: 0:00 – Must resist cheap Take That jokes. 0:05 – That is some fine house piano. 0:16 – Ah, the serrated whine of a voice that reminds me while I never really got into The Rapture. 0:55 – The fuzzy bass goes very well with the house piano loops. 1:40 – It sounds like he should be singing “Let me see that thong”. 2:00 – This thong thing is going to be hard to ignore. 2:20 – I guess enjoyment of the bass/piano just about balances out the voice. 2:58 – Thong thong thong thong thong. 3:54 – There sure seem to be a lot of saxophones in this year’s amnesty picks. 4:20 – This really keeps building and building, huh? 5:06 – Wow. With so much going on I actually enjoy the power of the “hallelujah!” yells over the top. 5:45 – It’s still building. I give in, I like it.
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