The Rapture, Factory Floor @ Shepherd's Bush Empire

House of crazy dancers

02/05/12

The Rapture

As a true fan of the authentic US punk/hardcore wave of the seventies and early eighties (don't even get me started on the protopunk explosion of the sixties...) I have looked at many of their more recent reincarnations with suspicion. Peculiarly so, New York's dance-punk wave, in the noughties, stroke a chord. Not that I find a deep purpose or meaning to it; but it does make me want to dance - with a twist.
Awaiting The Rapture, the big surprise came a bit early, in the form of Factory Floor. I caught them soundchecking and I pretty much thought they were a bomb; but I wasn't quite convinced till I witnessed their live show.
That threesome rules.
I was a bit too busy to notice the vocals, which I now discover on their recordings online (I funnily even wonder if they sang live at all...). My eyes were completely drawn by the wild drummer on the left front of the stage, rocking it under a dance attack of noisy electronics (which you couldn't miss, no matter how work-driven you were). From the Joy Division-oriented Francis Francis to their groovy latest video Two Different Ways (and all the remixes by the likes of New Order/Joy Division's Stephen Morris and Throbbing Gristle/Chris & Cosey's Chris Carter in between) Factory Floor are an amazing new-industrial number to get into. And I normally tend to distrust those too.
 Back to The Rapture, they were admittedly less captivating than their support band. Which didn't really make them bad at all.

Factory Floor were pretty edgy m***f****; which made the headliners more tame and accessible dance fashions sound a tad repetitive, in comparison. Funny thing, since it was precisely FF's dynamic industrial repetitiveness that made them so addictive.
But The Rapture standards, like House of Jealous Lovers and Echoes, always do it for me. Their recent third release In The Grace Of Your Love, on James Murphy's DFA, also came with melodic beats like How Deep Is Your Love. Which basically means that the guys belong in the present, as much as they did when they first broke the scene.
All in all, we shook it and swung it and had some pretty cool times. Factory Floor were the biggest discovery of talented support bands I've made since Other Lives (when they opened for Chapel Club last October). Naturally, it has a lot to do with the fact that both bands have accomplished a bit more than just support bigger names (where the hell have I been?!)...
And we expect a lot more.

Review by Danai Molocha, photography fished from the web.