We could sit here and kick around how The Rapture's new album, In the Grace of Your Love, marks a return to music for a band with all sorts of historic importance. Yes, Grace heralds the end of nearly a half-decade of purgatorial hiatus, and, yes, with it we see The Rapture back on DFA and off of a major label, but let's push aside the hype here for a moment and get down to brass tacks: There's this band that used to be together and then wasn't, and now is again. They made an album, it's the fourth one they've made, and it's, well ... it's great.
In the Grace of Your Love has ample surges of that catchy energy that made The Rapture so maddeningly appealing in the first place (see "Come Back to Me" and "How Deep Is Your Love"), but, more than that, Grace is a record seemingly made to tug the band and their audience's preconceived notions in new directions. And it's an album not concerned with drawing a lot of attention to that.
The Rapture are older now, and they've made a record full of odd little crafty tunes. A few stumble a bit, and one or two are just plain genius. But Grace has this loose, athletic feel that can only come with 15 years at the plate. Well, 15 years minus four or five in there. Did we mention they're great live? Because it's universally agreed that they are.
