Highest recommendation.

No longer content with emulating the angular sounds of Gang of Four and PiL, The Rapture now combines glam rock guitars, 70’s disco beats, and soul music’s heart-on-sleeve emotionality for a new direction: check out the Chicago house of “How Deep is Your Love?,” the latin-tinged “Come Back to Me,” the Club 54 disco of “Never Gonna Die Again,” the Here Comes the Warm Jets evoking “Roller Coaster,” and the closing torch song “It Take Time to Be a Man” for evidence of this newfound expansion in the group‘s sound.

In The Grace of Your Love is a honest-to-God dance album, one that refuses to compromise its ecstatic state with irony or hipster-chic. The Rapture’s new incarnation is now conceited with a sense of earnestness as admissions of love, spiritual longing, and the unsettling ups and downs of life are discussed with unapologetic sincerity. Even vocalist Luke Jenners has departed of his John Lydon evoking warble for the type of heart-on-sleeve belting that would seem more worthy of a disco-diva then a sneering punk. In the Grace of Your Love even eschews the group’s previous opaque lyricism to instead celebrate the sense of love, connectivity, and spirituality found in the beat - the ecstasy one experiences when fully giving themselves to the music.

The spiritual element actually weighs pretty heavy on this album: don’t assume for a moment that the figure being pleaded to on the title track is a woman (“In the grace of your love no one can ever die”).That’s also what is brilliant about this album, that the focus of Jenners’ affection is never fully defined. It could be a girl, but the love he espouses may as well be directed towards a god or spiritual figure. For that matter the recipient of this love may even be the music itself, as on “How Deep is Your Love?” where Jenners pleads “let me hear that song,” implying that his devotion may indeed be to the beat itself.