The house music that indie built

When Luke Jenner heard what would later become his band’s underground hit, “House of Jealous Lovers,� the 27-year-old lead singer for the Rapture didn’t like it.

“I hated it for the first year it came out. It didn’t sound finished. It didn’t feel right to me,� Jenner said of the song, a post-punk dance track that throws hand claps, cowbells and samples of a screaming audience into the mix.

Released in the U.K. as a single in April 2002, the song was a quick favorite with hip listeners, whose whispery excitement about the New York quartet led to the usual major-label courtship rituals, English media coverage, hyped-to-the-hilt record and now a whirlwind tour, which stops at the El Rey Theatre on Saturday and Sunday.

In light of the single’s success, Jenner said, he’s since had a change of heart about the song, but he was right to be skeptical. The Rapture and its long-awaited full-length album “Echoes,� on which “House of Jealous Lovers� appears, is a grand experiment that could have exploded in the laboratory. The group, formerly a dime-a-dozen indie rock band with a thing for the Cure, took a U-turn and made a house record.

“Pretty much the goal of indie rock is to tour a lot and eventually move up to selling less than 100,000 [albums],� said Jenner, who also plays guitar for the group. “We looked around and realized most of our favorite bands weren’t indie rock bands and saw where we were headed and decided we didn’t want to keep going down that path.�

Helping them toward that end: James Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy, a.k.a. the DFA, an acclaimed production duo who have done remixes for the enterprising musical collective U.N.K.L.E and feminist punk electronica act Le Tigre. In 1999, Murphy saw the Rapture at a New York rock club and offered to take them on.

“We didn’t have any other options that were as sort of glamorous,� said Jenner. “They had this multimillion-dollar studio and unlimited, sort of seemingly free time to work on it.�

The group didn’t know what they were in for. The DFA had a fairly unorthodox recording process that began with the Rapture recording their own songs, the DFA reworking them and the two finding a middle ground that would become the final product. Beyond being unconventional and, at times, unnerving, the technique was time-consuming. It took more than a year for the group to finish the record, released last month on Strummer Recordings, an imprint of Universal Music.

The latest in a long line of New York bands that’s recently ridden the neo-disco bandwagon into town, the Rapture may or may not be the one that crosses over into the mainstream, but clear away the dense fog of hype and there’s an intriguing sound. The band may have shifted its focus away from indie rock, but the basics are still there; it’s just that the emphasis is now percussion, not melody. The bass and drums still get the group’s groove on, but even instruments like piano and guitar are used to bang out the beat. Mix that together with the fancy-footed energy of house music and the retro punk-pop of ‘80s Brit bands like PiL and you’ve got a potent sonic cocktail that should be, and no doubt has been, served at many an art school dance party.

“They’re definitely successful in creating a new sort of dance sound, in the sense that this is the music that gets rock kids dancing,� said Duane Harriott, sales manager for independent New York record store Other Music, where the record is selling steadily. But, he added, “it probably would have had much more impact had it come out maybe six months to a year ago, simply because at the time their first single came out, they were really the only band doing music like that. Now there are three or four others doing the same thing.�

The Rapture is the brainchild of Jenner and Vito Roccoforte, his childhood friend from the San Diego suburb of La Mesa. In the mid-’90s, the two moved to San Francisco, where, Jenner has said, they listened to a lot of college radio: the Smiths, Soft Cell and Gary Numan, the latter of which they openly admit to ripping off in their first band, the short-lived Calculator. Emphasizing style over substance, the group wore matching uniforms a la the Hives. It wasn’t long before they felt trapped by their own gimmick and broke up.

They formed the Rapture in 1998, adding a bass player. In 1999, Gravity Records released their first full length, a retro rock album with synthesizers, programmed drums and pitch-perfect, Robert Smith-style vocals that sowed the seeds for their present success.

“As kind of this ambitious, sort of sellout move to try and get involved in the indie rock world,� as Jenner said, the group packed up and moved to Seattle later that year. The plan worked: The group was signed to Sub Pop, which later released their EP, “Out of the Races and Onto the Track.�

The group, however, didn’t like living in Seattle and moved to New York, where they have replaced their bass player and added a saxophonist.

It was this lineup that hooked them up with the DFA and led them on a yearlong recording journey that had them spending hours at the studio listening to classic British bands of the ‘80s (such as Gang of Four), not-so-classic bands of the ‘90s (such as Happy Mondays) and house -- lots of house. All of which has melted together in “Echoes,� especially “House of Jealous Lovers,� the near-perfect retro, indie-rock, dance track that’s been embraced by both the rock and dance communities.

“House music in general is like going to the store every week and having a pile of 12-inches,� said Jenner, who can walk the talk. He owns thousands of house records. “Something like ‘House of Jealous Lovers’ is going to jump out at you, and it did, and it still does.�

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The Rapture

When: Saturday and Sunday,

8 p.m.

Where: El Rey Theatre,

5515 Wilshire Blvd., L.A.

Cost: $17.50

Info: (323) 936-4790