The idea seems quaint today, but it also has yet to be surpassed by a better answer for how to bring the genre out of its ass and back to the masses. Yes, cowbell was once considered the crucial totem that would save rock ‘n’ roll. “House Of Jealous Lovers” was a moment that started a movement, beating “Losing My Edge” to release by a few months as the ignition point of the new dance-punk wave that seemed to represent the only possible path forward for rock music. Their presence on the poster - sitting between a Passion Pit Manners anniversary show and artists with once inescapable hits like Miike Snow and STRFKR that now induce lethologica upon trying to remember who was behind them - has qualified their revival as not a new lease on life but a final joyride for anyone still sentimental about iPod classics.Īll of this greatly contrasts with how the Rapture’s career felt at the onset.
The announcement of their reunion this February was similarly treated almost entirely with a shrug, their name appearing on Just Like Heaven’s nostalgia-leaning lineup without prior announcement followed by a cautious confirmation from the bandmates that while yes, they’re back, they know about as much of what that means as you do. The breakup of the Rapture in 2014 was already a muted affair, based around a never-official pull-quote from DFA’s manager Jonathan Galkin that prompted the individual members to air out some vague grievances that were being hashed out behind the scenes. The Strokes, Franz Ferdinand, and the Killers, once rock stars of untouchable cool, now shrug off dispirited routine releases to fund the more expressive side projects they prefer to invest their time in. LCD Soundsystem’s grand reintroduction at Coachella in 2016 was one of the festival’s least attended headlining sets since the Stone Roses, marking the former as a legacy act of the same caliber as the latter in the accelerated internet age. But regardless of when they reemerged, the group would inevitably have had to contend with a moment when the last bands to feel like the biggest in the world are returning to one that’s largely left them behind. The Rapture’s comeback - beginning with a surprise set at Brooklyn’s Gold Room last week and a show at Music Hall Of Williamsburg tonight - missed that ideal timing, a window when everyone was fondly reminiscing about how cool Manhattan used to be and felt warm at the thought of a jewel CD case. Interpol pulled a similar stunt the month before, building concert events around running through all of their landmark Turn On The Bright Lights in New York and Los Angeles. Later that year, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs - now more than half a decade from releasing their last LP - reissued a massive box set of their breakout debut, coinciding with coastal shows built around performing the album in full. A number capitalized on the book’s popularity to cash in on the nostalgia they’d accrued in the years since the “fever to tell” died down. If closing the chapter on the era struck you as narratively premature, the characters that comprised the story didn’t seem to mind. The next big thing felt like it was perpetually coming, a groundswell you could feel both in the streets and on the virtual highways.īut like New York itself, the scene that was once a bastion of cultural credibility has entered a middle age that’s traded the cheap thrills of gutters and garages for the more refined high of warehouse breweries, Instagrammable brunch, and “fast casual.” Times change before you can realize they were already gone, and it wasn’t until the publishing of Lizzy Goodman’s excellent oral history Meet Me In The Bathroom in 2017 that many learned the city’s rock renaissance of the early millennium had officially become a “once was” rather than anything that still lives and breathes today. The novelty of being tuned in in real time coupled with the high concentration of classic albums coming out of a relatively compact setting created a magical tension in the air, a mixture of sawdust and gunpowder that could ignite at the strike of a well-mic’d kick drum. At least that’s the mythos we remember, a perception built in New York and then distributed via the burgeoning blogging and RSS-based “Web 2.0″ across the rest of the nation. Do you remember what the early aughts felt like? The smell of leather jackets and canvas shoes pressed into vinyl booths, stage dives at dive bars, alternate cover art and lost tracks internalized into “if you know, you know” attitudes.