Five years after being typecast as a retro-rock buzz band, Danish duo the Raveonettes have brought their cinematic, hooked-on-classics sound into sharp focus. By Chris Barton Photo by Pamela Littky
2003, America was heading into an election year full of hope and promise, with the prospect of real change in the air. Although a war had just started in Iraq, the government offered comforting promises that it would be over quickly, culminating with the unfurling of a “Mission Accomplished” banner on a battleship’s deck. And in the world of music, the White Stripes, the Strokes and vintage-sounding, feedback-embracing Danish duo the Raveonettes made fans and critics swoon. It was “the return of rock,” an apparent revival of the raw energy and integrity of garage rock that would bring the genre back to its roots and, it was hoped, dominance.
Cut to five years later. “Change” is again the word of the day as another election closes in, the mission in Iraq is not accomplished after all, and though rock ’n’ roll wasn’t quite saved, the Raveonettes—guitarist/ singer Sune Rose Wagner and bassist/singer Sharin Foo—are still fighting for its honor with their third full-length. Lust Lust Lust (Vice) is an alternately buoyant and brooding trip through the Raveonettes’ signature terrain, mixing peppermint-crisp melodies with a dark shadow of reverb and electronics. Energized after closing out their contract with Columbia Records, Wagner and Foo are thrilled to be starting over on an indie label, but don’t look to them for any major-label horror stories.
“We had a really good time being on Columbia,” says Wagner, seated next to Foo in her cozy Los Angeles apartment. “I mean, what an experience to try, especially around the time that we signed because the record industry was still kind of ’The Record Industry,’ which has now changed so much. It was nice to get the big deal and be in New York at the time and meet all the great people and do all the great things. But you know, I think we just wanted to … ” He pauses to measure his words carefully. “Our music is just more ’indie’ in that sense. It’s not really top-10 material, unfortunately, not in today’s mainstream-radio hell. So it just makes more sense to work with someone who understands the music and where we’re coming from.”
“It all just comes down to the album itself, and the response has been even greater than we expected,” says Adam Shore, general manager of Vice Records. “A lot of people who had written them off are giving them a fresh listen, and they’re finally realizing what we’ve known all along. They are a seductive band who write addictive songs, and they are eternally cool.”
Though the Raveonettes formed in Copenhagen in 2001, they currently reside on opposite sides of North America; the band has been bi-coastal since Foo relocated to L.A. a year ago for what she demurely calls “relationship reasons.” (Foo and Wagner have never been anything more than creative partners.) Wagner remained in New York City, where he’s lived on and off since 1998, to start work on the new album. The songwriting was easy; the hard part was deciding which direction the band should take next.
Working in the early-morning hours, Wagner recorded more than 100 songs on his computer, each with varying sonic directions. Some were dominated by electronics, while others veered toward what Foo called “a big Glastonbury album, playing the main stage at midnight.” The two worked through them all, emailing files to build and rearrange. Next to a fireplace in Foo’s apartment, a sprawling computer set-up dominates the rear of the living room on a steely, Scandinavian-looking desk, surrounded by guitars, microphone stands and a hopelessly overmatched space heater.
“We don’t use live drums, and we don’t use guitar amplifiers, either, so there’s really no need for us to go into an actual studio,” says Wagner. “And when you’re home, you can just work when you want to work, and it’s free.”
The process for the self-produced Lust Lust Lust was a far cry from the typical major-label routine: the thousands of dollars spent for studio time, the tour-bus-driven road trips, the unending quest for a radio-ready single. And that, of course, is the point. Though the Raveonettes don’t harbor any hard feelings about their time with Columbia, Richard Gottehrer, an industry veteran who produced Blondie and the Go-Go’s as well as the Raveonettes’ first two albums, paints a more typical picture.
“To some degree, [Columbia] did a very good job; to a lesser degree, they didn’t do such a good job,” Gottehrer says diplomatically, noting the underwhelming support generated for Pretty In Black, the band’s 2005 sophomore album. “They would interfere in some ways: ’Oh, we need more guitars on the record. We need this for college radio.’ That kind of stuff. With artists like the Raveonettes, who are truly recording artists, they’re not making records to sell millions of records. That’s not the motivation.”
Attempts to reach a representative at Columbia who could speak about the Raveonettes’ time with the label were unsuccessful. Columbia has been hampered by layoffs and corporate consolidation in recent years. Yvette Noel-Schure, head of the label’s media department, could only say, “There’s been so much personnel change here I’m not sure I can help.”
Located in the shadow of Los Angeles’ sprawling Griffith Park, Foo’s apartment is almost a microcosm of the Raveonettes’ aesthetic. Part of a small cluster of cottages known affectionately to those in the neighborhood as the “Houses of the Seven Dwarves,” the complex’s crumbling charm and cartoonish shingled roofs recall Old World Europe, while their location and history—right down to the 1931 structure’s rumored inspiration for Disney’s Snow White—is a fading reminder of vintage Hollywood.
Foo takes a moment to point out an apartment across the courtyard, which was used in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. It’s the sort of Hollywood trivia you would expect from a band that’s looked to cinema for inspiration in everything from album covers to the B-movie-inspired video for debut single “Attack Of The Ghost Riders.” But prior to that song’s debut, Wagner was writing and recording what would become 2002 EP Whip It On while living in L.A. The Raveonettes worked under a set of self-imposed songwriting restrictions, such as using only a single key (B-flat minor). Whip It On fell in line with the Dogme 95 movie aesthetic, a back-to-basics philosophy created by directors and fellow Danes Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg in the mid-’90s. Dogme 95 dictated purity in filmmaking by utilizing hand-held cameras and only natural light. But Wagner insists Whip It On’s raw feeling of addition by subtraction wasn’t based on an arbitrary artistic experiment.
“We wanted to do something that we knew was going to be different,” he says. “Just very, very simple and [we thought], ’Well, what do people have on albums these days that every single rock band has? They have a drum kit. Fuck, let’s not have a drum kit on it; let’s just have samples. But they use high hats, of course. Well, let’s don’t use a high hat.’ Just figuring out different ways of doing it. The effect is the same, but it’s just more interesting.”
While Whip It On and the Raveonettes’ atmospheric 2003 sequel, Chain Gang Of Love, stood out from their supposed garage-rock contemporaries, the band earned just as much attention for the comforting sense of nostalgia it generated: Phil Spector-produced girl groups, the Jesus And Mary Chain, Dion and Buddy Holly. So many sounds ordinarily relegated to late-night-TV compilation offers swirl around the Raveonettes’ songs in boldface type, practically begging to be referenced. Unlike bands that bristle at the notion that what spills from their amplifiers could be anything but original, Foo and Wagner are exceedingly comfortable with showing their roots.
“It could be because we’re from Denmark, such a small country that’s very far away from American pop culture, and we can pay homage to it,” says Foo between sips of tea. “It almost seems like we know American rock history better than so many American bands we meet that try and get away from it. We just have a much more romantic way of perceiving the myths within rock and pop.”
“But it’s important to emphasize that in no way are we a retro band or are we trying to be a retro band,” Wagner adds quickly. “We want to take from those references and the culture that we like, but we want to make it our own. We want to make it so people who don’t even know the culture will listen to it and go, ’Wow, this is really cool!’ And then they’ll be interested in finding out where it all came from.”
If Chain Gang Of Love was, as Foo puts it, the band’s ultimate noise album, its follow-up was a step back from the sound it established. Recorded with a full band, Pretty In Black carries a surprisingly glossy studio sheen when compared with the rest of the Raveonettes’ work. Even a hipster’s fantasy roster of guests such as Ronnie Spector, Moe Tucker and Suicide’s Martin Rev unfortunately gets lost in what sounds like a band falling too far down its traditionalist rabbit hole, culminating with a fairly on-the-nose cover of “My Boyfriend’s Back” (a 1963 song co-written by producer Gottehrer). Though Pretty In Black didn’t have the same impact as Chain Gang Of Love, Wagner stands by its comparatively polished, blown-dry sound, ultimately dubbing it “a wine album.”
“We always wanted to do an album like Pretty In Black: nice, clean-sounding, very sweet, very nostalgic,” says Wagner. “But we have that other [noisy] side, too, that we probably like better.” Eventually, he acknowledges the LP may not have been the most accurate reflection of the band’s strengths. “Maybe it lacks the contradictions, the sort of opposites that make us really good when we’re good.”
Lust Lust Lust finds the Raveonettes establishing a new sense of purpose, even on the surface. Gone is the lobby-poster iconography of albums past, the cover shots of a camera-ready duo who, in Foo’s case, has expanded into the world of fashion and unfortunate lad-mag lists itemizing the “hottest women in rock.” (Indifferent but amused by such things, Foo is quick to point out that Wagner was recently named the best-dressed man in Denmark by Euroman magazine.) Lust Lust Lust’s sleeve is dominated by its title, swelling to 3-D for some European editions, a somewhat ironic graphic choice given the state of the music industry. Ever the film buff, Wagner smiles and notes that Hollywood’s past fascination with 3-D arose amid fears that television would kill off the cinema during the ’50s.
Self-produced and years removed from major-label expectations, Lust Lust Lust plays like a shift back to basics for a band that never strayed far from them in the first place. “Aly, Walk With Me” gets things started with a rumbling, hip-shaking swagger and a howling, end-times guitar break that sounds like an overdriven airplane engine. The rest of the album is able to carry moods ranging from the sinister dread of “Lust” to the playful taunts of “You Want The Candy” to the relaxed drive of the hand claps leading “Sad Transmission.” Still devoid of crash cymbals and high hats, Wagner and Foo’s androgynous, sweetly harmonized vocals unite a record that may sound like a grocery list of bands that have come before them. But ultimately, it sounds most like the Raveonettes.
“Look at Tim Burton,” says Foo. “The way he makes movies, it’s got so many references, but there’s such a trademark of him.”
“David Lynch is good at it, too,” adds Wagner. “Take Twin Peaks. It literally looks like it could be in the ’50s or ’60s, but it’s totally modern. There are little references, the little outfits they wear, a little haircut on this guy. It draws from a lot of that, but he makes it his own and makes it current. That’s what we do.”
