The Raveonettes: Breaking the Rules
The Raveonettes’ goal was to create something surprising.
The Danish electro-rock duo (Sune Rose Wagner and Sharin Foo) achieved as much with Pe’ahi back in late July when they released their seventh album with little-to-no alert or prelude. In fact, the only warning they gave was to those with photosensitive epilepsy, as every song was made immediately streamable as a lyric video that contained minimal art intermittently exploding with retina-stinging storms of flashing lights.
But the arrangements are, in essence, surprising. Each song is a phantasmagorical jumble of orchestral and electronic instruments. The arrangements are inherently impulsive, with shifts in tempo and key-signatures segueing myriad moods and fleeting melodies under a wavy pipeline of growling guitars and hissing synth. Fittingly, with such inlaid suddenness, the album is named for a Hawaiian surfing spot known for its perilously high waves.
The second track, “Sisters,” features both the most calming, beautiful moment and also the most berserk. The minimal chorus, a gentle section uncharacteristically free of distortion, is flourished by a harp solo’s majestic peal under Foo’s porcelain-smooth melodic whisper. But that leads into this banging, brutal bridge where a sparking, aggravated-sounding guitar sets the whole thing on fire with its solo.
“I wanted to do something aggressive, hectic, chaotic,” admits Wagner. But on the first take, unbeknownst to him as he started playing, a guitar string broke. The spirit of spontaneity called him to just try and continue shredding. “And it fit that song perfectly. If you want chaos, if you want unpredictability and aggression, well, then, there’s your solo, right there, done.”
If Pe’ahi sounds like carefully composed chaos, it’s because it was influenced by a particular Grateful Dead album. Wagner admitted an inspiration to replicate the recording approach of the Dead’s Anthem Of The Sun.
“They would record a verse in one studio and then the chorus in another and somehow they put it all together. I always thought about that, how I don’t have to go into a traditional chorus; I can just make pieces and I’ll put all these pieces together and see what happens, with unconventional structures where there were, just, no rules. I can go from a very heavy part into a super mellow glockenspiel or a very beautiful vocal part and then back into something completely nuts.”
“I was just inspired to do something that was surprising to people.”
Shape and Sound
When Wagner’s father, with whom he’d had a complicated and distant relationship, passed away on Christmas Eve, 2013, he and singer Sharin Foo were just starting to submerse themselves into the studio. “…And, instead of going into mourning or grieving,” Wagner says, “I basically just worked overtime and all of a sudden everything made sense to me, in terms of what album I was making.”
The resulting songs are seething with his most honest and accusatory lyrics he’d ever written. “So, in a sort of morbid way, you might say his passing helped shape the album.”
But Pe’ahi doesn’t sound morbid because the bereavement merely intensified their work ethic. The actual sound of these 10 new songs was shaped by the meditative shorelines near their home outside of Los Angeles. Most listeners peg the Danish duo as retro-revivalists, inclined towards early ‘60s rock and insistently noisy blends of ‘80s shoegaze and new-wave. Past releases found them spilling strutting beats under simple chord structures smacked with sweet bubblegum-pop melodies that were darkly drenched by sinister sounding storms of feedback and flashes of unnerving synthesizer tones.