RAVEONETTES BREAK SOUND BARRIER
LIFE
MUSIC REVIEW
ERIC R. DANTON; Courant Rock Critic
448 Words
13 December 2003
The Hartford Courant
STATEWIDE
D8
English
Copyright 2003, The Hartford Courant. All Rights Reserved.
One of the Raveonettes wasn't able to perform Thursday night at the Pearl Street Night Club in Northampton, apparently because of some infection
in his arms.
And singer and guitarist Sune Rose Wagner felt some numbness in his right arm, having gotten a shot of morphine earlier in the day at the hospital
when he learned he had a kidney stone.
With such daunting medical obstacles to overcome, the three musicians on stage could be excused for giving a sub-par performance. That is, if they had
given a sub-par performance.
They did not.
The Danish hipsters instead glided through a set of rock 'n' roll tunes that evoked '50s and '60s Brill Building-style music run
through a churning sonic blender.
Noise, you see, is an essential component of the Raveonettes' music. The group takes vintage song structures and adds shattering sheets of static
for an effect akin to listening to a distant AM radio station through a torn speaker cone piped into an overdriven megaphone. Add to that the dreamy,
droning vocal harmonies of Wagner and bassist Sharin Foo, a statuesque 6-foot blonde, and a batch of songs in one of two musical keys -- B-flat major
and B-flat minor -- and you have the perfect soundtrack for a modern take on vintage biker movies.
Foo rolled out a queasy, rumbling bass line on ``Let's Rave On,'' Wagner dug into dirty, reverb-laced surf guitar riffs on ``Chain Gang
of Love,'' and the band descended into willful abrasion with ``Noisy Summer,'' which was, in fact, quite noisy.
Ima Robot was a different, more overt kind of weird.
The Los Angeles band pilloried consumerism on ``Here Come the Bombs,'' which fused sunny synth parts to brutal punk guitars. On ``A is
Action,'' elfin lead singer Alex Ebert yelped out letters of the alphabet, and what they stood for, in seeming random order over a chugging
guitar riff.
The band was tight, and the musicians easily negotiated tempo and style changes on trashy art-punk songs like ``Dirty Life'' and
``Dynomite,'' which featured rapid-fire switches between prominent guitars and sing-songy keyboards. The musicians play less obtuse stuff,
too, and they blasted full-throttle through the poppy hooks and vocal harmonies of ``Alive.''
Ima Robot has a gem of a song in ``Black Jettas,'' a funny, paranoid account of a guy who thinks he sees his ex-girlfriend behind the wheel
of every one of the popular cars he encounters. Ebert delivered the lyrics deadpan, while '80s-style keyboard, skittering guitar riffs and an
insistent bass line swirled behind him.
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