For a band that started their career with an EP of songs limited to B-flat minor and only three chords, then a full-length debut exclusively in B-flat major, the Raveonettes have made a lot of progress. The Danish duo’s recipe has always been simple: continue the legacy of The Jesus and Mary Chain by combining 50s pop meets The Velvet Underground, with distorted, fuzzing guitars turned up to 11. Over the course of five albums in the past 10 years, the band has explored the tried-and-true noise pop model of dreamy vocals and catchy hooks, with 2008’s Lust Lust Lust eschewing towards the loud side and 2009’s In And Out Of Control sticking closer to pop. Their newest release, Raven In the Grave, finds the Danish duo marrying those two sounds and leaving a nice gothic shade over the whole thing.
As with all of their albums, Sune Rose Wagner and Sharin Foo use saccharine, shiny pop production to add little spotlights to the overall doom and gloom of their records. Raven is no different, opening with “Recharge and Revolt” which begins with an inviting drum beat and scuzzy guitars before Wagner sings about love lost and a decaying world. That track has way too much in common with “Just Like Honey,” the opening song off The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy, which is essentially the Sgt. Pepper of noise pop and the soundtrack to the ending of Lost In Translation. Both songs are heavy with dreamy, detached vocals that waver out from behind a scratchy guitar, but it’s been 25 years since that album launched the genre. Here it sounds as though the duo are giving a tongue-in-cheek nod to their most obvious influence right at the outset, immediately acknowledging and paying their debt before moving on.
The lyrics are the duo’s usual mix of melancholic darkness. Aesthetically, the group achieves the ghostly quality that Canadian supergroup Stars were going for on last summer’s The Five Ghosts. Whereas Stars skewed a bit too pop-heavy when trying to blend in lyrical phantoms, the Raveonettes get the sonic underpinning just right, singing duets of gothic romantic tragedy with light around the edges, instead of shiny pop songs with a confusingly dark lining.
Wagner and Foo never sound as though they’re too down in the dumps though, even if the album is full of bleak and angsty themes accompanied by shadowy, echoing rhythm guitars and spooky bass lines. There’s an irony to the way that electronic elements brighten up the darkness created by atmospheric instrumentation. Despite the rough and gritty textures to the album, Raven In the Grave still manages to hold a summery quality. “Forget That You’re Young” spins in a shimmering and haunting circle, and “Ignite” lends some much needed speed to the second half of the album — the band tends to sound much better with a healthy dose of pace instead of slowing things down.
It’s not hard to imagine this album as the soundtrack to a drive down the California coast or the Lakeshore during a breezy summer sunset, and it hardly matters anymore whether or not the Raveonettes ever produce an album that stands on par with Psychocandy. They don’t need to produce a classic because there’s something to be said for sticking to a working formula, and Raven In the Grave is proof that nothing is broken yet.
Final Grade: B+