Fans of noise-pop duo The Raveonettes who are anxious to hear more details about the twosome's upcoming album can relax a little. The pair has already posted two demos from the record, and superfans will be able to get more in the coming weeks.
After keeping fans updated with his play-by-play MySpace updates, Sune Rose Wagner of the Raveonettes finally announced the Danish twosome is ready to hit the studio and record the follow-up to 2008's Lust Lust Lust. In recent weeks, Wagner has posted a new blog entry nearly every day, keeping fans in the loop to whom he and bandmate Sharin Foo had spoken.
The Village Voice announced the lineup earlier this week for the 9th annual Siren Music Festival. Leading the way this year is Built to Spill and Danish duo The Raveonettes. Both groups have albums due this year: Built to Spill's There is No Enemy is supposedly due sometime this Fall, and The Raveonettes is a Sept. 1 release (which they were working on last we heard).
After months of anticipation, Lollapalooza has finally announced its full 2009 line-up. Taking place Aug. 7-9 in Chicago's Grant Park, the event hosts the proverbial headliners (Tool, The Killers, Jane's Addiction, Beastie Boys, Lou Reed, Snoop Dog, Depeche Mode), the indie-rock staples (Vampire Weekend, TV On the Radio, The Decemberists, Ben Folds, Of Montreal) the slightly under-the-radar favorties (The Raveonettes, Bat For Lashes, Ra Ra Riot, Heartless Bastards) and the up-and-coming baby bands (Passion Pit, Hockey, The Low Anthem, The Virgins) one might expect, plus many more.
In our last Raveonettes update, we suggested the duo take some well-deserved time off after a busy 2008 and hit the beaches of Hawaii. Turns out, we weren't too far off.
After teasing fans for months, lusty L.A. trio Gliss finally announced it is ready to release its second album, Devotion Implosion. Originally, the album was delayed due to mastering issues.
Check out Paste's top 50 albums of 2008...
The Raveonettes have announced a handful of summer tour dates, as well as a sibling lineup swap worthy of The Parent Trap.
Minimalist Danish duo maintains its irresistibly twisted ways
Has the element of danger once so vital to rock ’n roll’s beating heart become something of a quaint cliche? Elvis’ ascendency was pure, forbidden, hip-shake sex. The Stones—especially when compared to their scrubbed-up moptop contemporaries from Liverpool—felt vaguely threatening and dirty to a suitably appalled Middle England. Guns N’ Roses made a virtue of the squalor from which they crawled. Hell, the entire punk ethos—even Nirvana’s version, located more than a decade after the initial threat was detected and snuffed out—was essentially born in a cesspool. Embedded somewhere in our deepest subconscious lies the equation “menace + mindless indulgence/noise = rawk.” So how best to convey the essential qualities of this algorithm in a medium that has been there, done that?
Three albums deep in their latterday foray into this well-trodden world of lasciviousness and licentiousness, The Raveonettes can now be added to this list. The Danish duo—Sune Rose Wagner and his aluminum (haired) foil, Sharin Foo—aren’t exactly today’s Pete Doherty or Amy Winehouse, consuming their way into rehab and/or jail cells and then letting their art tell the same ol’ tawdry tale. But the sonically implied sordidness associated with their music is hard to miss, and the group’s latest release, Lust Lust Lust, rubs their short list of musical tricks (creepy guy/girl unison vocals, a flood of reverb spilling over Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, lyrics that leave more to your filthy little imagination than they typically spell out) together like dry sticks and makes fire in the process.
On 2005’s Pretty in Black, The Raveonettes spent an entire record attempting to break out of their selfimposed Jesus and Mary Chain/Velvet Underground minimalist penalty box with only occasionally effective results, drafting the Velvets’ Mo Tucker and Suicide’s Martin Rev for percussive cameos but never managing to push past the “this album is all songs in the key of B-flat minor” purism that characterized their earliest work. Indeed, the constraints the band imposed on itself early in its career created an almost inevitable critical backlash— comments such as “holy shit, I think my gimmick lobe just ruptured” were typical of a certain reaction to their single-minded mashup of Motown girlgroup affinities and JAMC wall-offeedback solos.
Now signed to a new label, Vice (which includes young-turk stablemates such as Justice, Chromeo, Black Lips and Bloc Party), The Raveonettes are once again back to making the most of just enough. The album’s lead track, “Aly, Walk With Me,” sounds like the soundtrack to a lost Quentin Tarantino noir-scape, flaunting a slinky urban beat and an ear-damaging feedback solo worthy of the Mary Chain’s Reid brothers while essaying wasted days and wasted nights in soul-corrupting American burgs such as Portland, Ore., and New York City. “You Want the Candy” is the pair’s updated take on the Mary Chain’s “Some Candy Talking” (but The Raveonettes’ “dirty treats” are all about molten sex vs. a spoonful of liquid sin), while tracks such as “Lust” (“I fell out of heaven to be with you in hell / My sin’s not quite ‘Seven,’ nothing much to tell”) and “With My Eyes Closed” (“I close my eyes to urge you to leave here … it was never meant to be familiar”) mark the duo as the new Mazzy Star: chilly, emotionally distant and beautifully unavailable. Like David Roback before him, Wagner is bent on seducing the ears with that uniquely Paisley Underground concoction— drowsy, drifting vocals marked with a post-modern ennui, insanely echoed surf-guitars that chime as often as they shred, and a darkly dazzling Doors-meet-the-Velvets vibe that teeters perilously between shamanistic obsession and drug-induced trance.
“Hallucinations” sums up the entirety of The Raveonettes’ value proposition: the notion that there is beauty in simplicity, depth in density. The drum part consists of a sparsely played snare line, while the guitars are either fuzzy down below (where the chords are) or piercing up above (where the solo lines reside)—a sweet/sour combination that creates just enough tension to maintain interest over the course of the song’s three-minute run time. The vocals are so hazy there’s almost a soporific quality about them. Pitting garage-rock tactics against Motown strategy, Lust Lust Lust is my kinda vice.
