THE RAVEONETTES
Pretty In Black
Columbia
· Danish duo continue to shake off the Jesus and Mary Chain comparisons to plumb the depths of America’s ’50s girl-group explosion. Yes, that’s right.
Blame David Lynch for making the classic American rock ’n’ roll ballad so God damned creepy. There’s the unsettling, unforgettable scene in Twin Peaks that saw the characters James, Maddie and Donna plunk out an off-key, utterly endearing doo-wop song right before Maddie got whacked by her uncle. Then there’s the weirdness at the end of Mulholland Drive in which the two tearful leads grasp each other, alone in a theatre watching a bizarre cabaret performance of a ’50s hit. And that’s just for starters.
It isn’t a stretch to think The Raveonettes drew a fair bit of inspiration from the director at the outset of their career, and with Pretty In Black they follow that muse even farther. The duo have ditched the raucous, joyous rock-out moments that made their previous records so energetic, turned down the distortion and wholeheartedly embraced Lynch’s twisted nostalgia for the golden decades of U.S. rock ’n’ roll and pop (the ’50s and ’60s). While they still infuse their take on American nostalgia with plenty of sex and death, they also incorporate more surf, less wall of noise and a decidedly more focused effort to highlight the vocals. This album is by no means bad, even with a terrible and utterly predictable cover of "My Boyfriend’s Back," but in losing the noise and that unabashed feeling of verging on chaos, they’ve also lost some of their charm. Some might say that the band is growing up, maturing. I say that The Raveonettes had previously been a good argument that rock ’n’ roll was best kept in the hands of the young. Pretty in Black seems to back up my case pretty well.
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