Loud Lullabies
The Raveonettes see the past through a lens of darkness, feedback, and lust
The past is sometimes your future in pop music. In the hands of Amy Winehouse, a sharp glance backward to the timeless cool of disheveled beehives and ’60s soul singers works as well as it did in the distant past, recasting a pure musical memory to the urgency of this week’s tabloid headlines. The Raveonettes do much the same, minus all the bad press, translating adolescent pop ballads through a lens of utter darkness and crisp melody, as if the Velvet Underground were playing behind Ronnie Spector.
Winehouse has mastered the old sounds within a modern context, but the Raveonettes take their devotion deeper into outer (and inner) space, a setting of cool nerves, melting hearts, and a wall of buzzing guitars and controlled feedback. It is the noise of young and desperate love. At the El Rey on Tuesday, the Danish duo stood in precise harmony for 75 minutes of loud lullabies on love gone wrong in great echoes and whispers.
Singer-guitarist-producer Sune Rose Wagner and singer-guitarist Sharin Foo performed in near-darkness for a full house, Wagner’s sleeves rolled up tight, Foo in a sparkling black dress and platinum hair. From their new album, Lust Lust Lust, came “Aly, Walk with Me,” setting words of simple devotion and romance against a charged landscape of explosive feedback and guitar (with tense drumbeats from Leah Shapiro).
Some critics have noted the recent return of noise into their songwriting as a positive step (after going without on 2005’s Pretty in Black), but onstage all the songs blended easily and naturally in a flow of beauty and static.
From the new album, the band also performed “Lust,” a song with the lilt and seriousness of a cowboy ballad, Wagner plucking an ominous melody of intrigue and sadness, as they sang: “I fell out of heaven/To be with you in hell.” It was soon followed by “Love in a Trashcan” (from 2005), a restrained guitar epic of snarky riffs and echo, both Foo and Wagner slashing and plucking their guitars between whispered harmonies somehow both classic and futuristic: “Now the time is right and you feel the need/To go down low and receive a treat/The jukebox churns out songs about sex/Come on baby you’re my best fix.”
A cover of Stereolab’s “French Disko” was the most straight-ahead modern rock moment of the night, as Foo sang of solidarity in a high and urgent voice amid fast, slashing guitar: “Though this world’s essentially an absurd place to be living in/It doesn’t call for total withdrawal ….” It fit them as comfortably as the retro ballads. The songs otherwise tumbled from the stage at a quick but unhurried pace, a dreamy avalanche of melody, feedback, and high style for the ages.
The wind-up dolls of Be Your Own Pet opened the night by also looking back. The young punk/noise minimalists could have stepped out of some underground basement in ’79, with short, sharp shocks of energy and no real songs to remember them by.
Singer Jemina Pearl Abegg was a wild and unsteady presence, hopping and pacing the stage for 30 minutes, ready to rock or aerobicise. Some of it worked as no-frills punk rock, offering a rougher, tougher blend than the pop-punk formula filling the airwaves, but nothing else new. Yesterday’s ideas aren’t always enough.
Published: 03/05/2008
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