Album Review: Lust Lust Lust by The Raveonettes

Danish boy-girl duo the Raveonettes’ fourth CD crackles like a transmission from some spectral AM radio station — one playing tunes from the supergroup that, in an alternate universe, the Ronettes, My Bloody Valentine, and the Velvet Underground formed on a lost weekend. Laced with languid two-part harmonies, fuzz-addled feedback, and bittersweet Spector melodics, Lust Lust Lust is a gauze-wrapped cocoon of an album: too opaque to break through to a wide audience, but all the more precious for its enigmatic, slow-to-surface charms. A-DOWNLOAD THIS: ”Aly, Walk With Me” .

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The Raveonettes' third album, Lust Lust Lust, is the sound of a band rescuing its career from the clutches of cliché and rediscovering the magic that made it so exciting on its debut, Chain Gang of Love. The opening track, "Aly, Walk with Me," serves notice that things are going to be a lot different, the menacing prowl of the verses giving way to a deafening burst of white light/white heat noise halfway through the song. Those fearing that Lust Lust Lust would be another record lost to over-production and slickness should, once they regain their hearing, be ecstatic.

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The Raveonettes obscure their material in such a thick cocoon of style that it takes some strenuous effort to cut through to the actual music. Strip away all of their retro packaging and there’s still a whole lake of Jesus and Mary Chain distortion to traverse. In the past, it’s led me to wonder whether this duo actually had a beating heart or if it was just a pair of window-display dummies who had somehow learned how to play instruments.

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The Raveonettes have gone back to noise for this album, so if you like them best when they sound like early Jesus and Mary Chain, you’ll be annoying your neighbours for months with this. It’s not a completely derivative tribute to Psychocandy, but they’d be lying if they pretended they don’t owe a heavy debt to it. It’s all songs about sex and death gently sung over chords and rhythms borrowed from 60s bubblegum pop, drenched in reverb and then ripped apart by some terrifying shards of distorted guitar.

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Has any advancement in pop music stayed as cool for as long as the Wall of Sound? That sound brings very real images to the backs of the eyes: sex, death, chrome, vistas, smoke, streaks of light, perhaps love, or realistically, a feral lust. It has imposed itself into visual art, achieving synaesthesia in a way that’s circled kitsch and back to its starting point. It is as it seems; all we want is reverb and gloss, a mountain of sound-as-emotion swelling up beneath us, injecting in our veins that feeling that travels to the pits of our stomachs, that ache in the chest.

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Cuddly as a young junkie, the reverb-drenched Raveonettes give themselves a partial makeover on Lust Lust Lust. Based in NYC, Danish duo Sune Rose Wagner and Sharin Foo aren't content simply to revisit past haunts, so since bloat begot fast chords, presently we find the Raveonettes celebrating punk heritage. Up against the wall of sound and facing down frequent comparisons to the Jesus & Mary Chain, the newer paradigm relies on quick, bright guitar lines and upfront vocals for velvety freshness.

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