The Rapture at The Basement in Columbus, OH: Teaching the Hipster Kids How to Dance

When we got to The Basement tonight to see The Rapture unleash their particular brand of rap-rock poetry on Columbus, it was just about nine degrees and the doors weren't open yet. There was one girl in line, and she had been there for about a half-hour. Just twenty feet away - at the much bigger sister venue, The Lifestyles Community Pavilion - the crowd with no with no taste were all waiting patiently (in a line snaking around the building, no less) for Blue October. After a twenty minute wait in the bar just above the venue (and out of the biting cold), we made our way down to The Basement to await the entrance of the opening band, Under The Influence of Giants.

While the crowd was pretty nonexistant when the doors opened at 7PM (even for a weekday show), by the time UTIOG took the stage at around 8:15, a pretty sizeable crowd had made their way through the cold with dancing on their minds. The lights flashed and hipsters squealed. The lead singer, Jared Leto lookalike Aaron Bruno, spent a solid hour pacing, dancing, and belting out the band's signature brand of white-boy-Cali-soul. Their MTV Disco went over well with this blogger, and especially for the gaggle of girls that were dancing their skinny, hipster asses off for the entirety of the set. Their tunes were solid from top to bottom, whether they were "Thriller Era" Michael Jackson ("Faces"), or face melting bass-lines of mid-nineties dance pop ("In the Clouds"). The lead guitarist showed everyone his chops with his disgusting shred skills during their closing number (and next single), "In The Clouds". UTIOG fulfilled every obligation of a great opener, and they had the crowd's pump well primed for the main attraction.

Even before we showed up tonight, I knew that this was going to be a difficult show to review. You see, I may be an indie kid, and I may be a critic, but let's face it, everyone loves to dance to The Rapture. Here in Columbus we're lucky enough to have an Indie-themed dance party once a month called The Clampdown, so it's not like I had to wait for a great band like The Rapture to come through to get my dance-rock fix, but there is a stark difference between dancing to tunes spun by a DJ in skinny jeans, and the sleazy leer of a greasy New York dance band rocking your face from a foot away.

That said, it was really had to force myself to take good notes during the show, when all I wanted to do was dance. As I was looking back over what few notes I did have, I decided to share a few of them with you: "It's hard to review a show when all you wanna do is dance" or "Bass line thru the motherfucking FLOOR" or "Fuck, the beats are just too much". All these hastily scribbled notes point to the energy that the band projected through their instruments into our brains and our feet and our hips. This energy was a bit at odds with their presence on stage, which was decidedly un-energetic. They seemed to be content in letting multi-instrumentalist (and Skronk Sax extraordinaire) Gabriel Abruzzi take on the dancing responsibilities onstage, and left the rest of the dancing to the crowd. And boy did they deliver. After going to so many shows of passively nodding, maybe mouthing the words, or even sitting down, it was quite interesting to see so many hipsters letting their walls of pretension down for this one evening, and just dancing the fuck out. The Rapture were like a great house band: they left the dancing to the sweaty, writhing bodies in the pit, acting as a mere conduit for the beats.

This kind of conduction of energy is exactly what brought several dull, lifeless tracks from their previous two releases up to the level of their best, most rockin' tracks on record. Songs like "Down So Long", "Pieces of the People We Love", and "First Gear" were all given new life in the live setting, transforming them from middling tracks that will often get the skip treatment, to rocking, sweaty, touching, groping, rubbing, balls of dirty dance music. And we all loved it. They closed the show with a personal favorite, "Olio", which was an interesting contrast, due to the lack of instrumentation and the almost pure knob-twiddling dance music of the track. But when the house lights went up and the empty beer bottles were clanking drunkenly across the floor, when the steam was escaping in billowing clouds from the sweaty bodies filing out into the cold February night, it all made sense. Thanks to The Rapture (and by extension, UTIOG), the hipster kids learned how to dance, and boy did we.

Be sure to check back tomorrow night for the pictures and videos from the show. While I may not have been taking many notes, I took what might very well have been my finest concert shots ever. These are pictures you won't wanna miss!

The Rapture Official Site
The Rapture on MySpace
Buy "Pieces of the People We Love" on Amazon.com
Under the Influence of Giants Official Site
Under the Influence of Giants on MySpace
Buy "Under the Influence of Giants" on Amazon.com

"Get Myself into It" The Rapture
"In The Clouds" Under the Influence of Giants