The Rapture’s major label debut, Echoes (produced by the in-demand Death From Above team) divided opinion here at uk-fusion, but certainly caused quite a stir back in 2003. Since then, the punk-funk-disco template has proved popular, with music journo-types continuing to salivate over New York exports, such as LCD Soundsystem. The question is, can they do it again?

Well, sadly not quite. Pieces of the People We Love takes much the same ingredients, such as a healthy love of 80s post-punk filtered through millennial electroclash, but fails to have anything as exciting as ‘House of Jealous Lovers’, with which the band made their name.

The first three tracks are all upbeat numbers that sound a little like The Futureheads, which I wouldn’t consider a good starting point, and rather too much like each other. By the time you get to ‘First Gear’, you’re glad for something different, but sadly it’s sub-LCD Soundsystem electro, and that’s the story for much of the record: there are nice moments, but little that really makes one sit up and pay attention. Perhaps the exception is ‘Calling Me’, which is definitely one of the stronger songs – yet unfortunately the chorus “I hear them calling me” is sufficiently close to Joy Division’s ‘Dead Souls’ to bring unfavourable comparisons to mind.

The ‘difficult second album’ tag is something of a cliché, but there’s a reason for it: many bands struggle to cope with the weight of expectation following a successful debut, and – while Echoes wasn’t really a debut as such, it was the record that brought The Rapture into the public eye – it seems that’s what’s happened here. There are *ahem* pieces of the band we love, but this won’t be the album to make The Rapture huge.
(3/5)