Image from the Raveonettes Myspace page
#7 Lust Lust Lust by the Raveonettes (Vice Records)
I'll admit that I dismissed the Raveonettes prematurely. When they suddenly appeared on the scene in 2002, it seemed like they were everywhere. It's not hard to see why - they had a great marketing hook. They were doing back-to-basics black-leather garage rock with a strict set of rules. All songs in Bb Major. All songs under three minutes. All songs restricted to three chords or less. I'm all for musicians making things challenging for themselves, but this sounded more like a band pretending their own limitations and lack of experience were choices rather than necessities. And the other thing that bugged me was that they got all sorts of attention from MTV of all places. Their videos got a lot of play, and it seemed like it must be their label, Columbia, trying to give them the old "payola push."
This year, though, the Raveonettes made an album good enough that all is forgiven. The single from Lust Lust Lust caught my attention with its spy-theme riff, Portland references, and white-noise distortion interludes, but it was the video for "Dead Sound" that convinced me to pay closer attention. They'd stopped talking about their strict "rules", but their simplicity now seems more driven by choice than before. And they've found ways of creating dynamics that elevate simple songs, using their Jesus-and-Mary-Chain-inspired noise to their advantage by dropping it away from a chorus or bridge and then throwing it back in at the key moment. Little touches like the faraway-sounding drum machine on "Blitzed" or the clip-clop percussion on "Sad Transmission" keep things fun.
Which is not to say that the album is not simple, almost to the point of monotony. Somehow, though, the monotony seems like a value-add this time. Even the lyrics address the same ideas again and again - take the line "Your heartbeat stops when I tell you that lovers always part." Is that line from the song "The Beat Dies"? is it from US bonus track "My Heartbeat's Dying"? No! They have a third heartbeat-oriented lyric on the record, "Sad Transmission". It's this kind of obvious repetition of themes and sounds that puts me at ease, knowing that it's a method that I can enjoy if I just let go a little. And it honestly works so much better than the Magnetic Fields' more cerebral attempt at the same concept with their Distortion album.
"You Want the Candy" does a good job of demonstrating their way of reducing, simplifying, and borrowing from obvious sources with great results. The title may be a reference to their friend and producter, Richard Gottehrer, who wrote the classic "I Want Candy". That's right - the guy from the Strangeloves, one of the great fake garage bands of the '60s. The propulsive drumming, the filthy-cute lyrics, the way all the instruments drop out at the beginning of each verse... what's not to like?
"You Want the Candy" by the Raveonettes
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