Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 25/07/05
Label: Columbia

Sometimes, impeccable taste - and The Raveonettes have impeccable rock'n'roll taste in spades, and probably black leather spades at that - can be just a tad dull.

That's not to say that the Danish duo's second long-player - which de-fuzzes previous Velvet Underground/Phil Spector/Mary Chain-marinated efforts and shelves a rather nerdish Dogme rulebook (B minor, B major, yada yada) - isn't a supermodel-svelte homage to a pantheon of 'the very cool'. The guest musicians here say it all: Velvets drummer Mo Tucker, Ronnie Spector ("Ode To LA"), Suicide's Martin Rev, all required reading in the postgraduate studies of mono-and-chrome pop hipsterism.

Factor in some carefully-assembled B-movie album art; lyrics about sex, twilight and Texas; sidewinding Duane Eddy guitars ("Love In A Trashcan"); dreamily arctic harmonies ("Sleepwalking"); note-perfect 50s doo-wop stardust ("Here Comes Mary"); 12-string guitars and castanets and a spectral Elvis pastiche ("The Heavens"), and you couldn't ask for a more thorough compendium of stylishness.

But, fine as this is, and impeccable as the record collections, cheekbones and clobber of the people who created it are, you may be faintly underwhelmed. Maybe it's the loss of that feedback - a tactic that, as the brothers Reid knew, adds a nasty, sharp-fanged urgency to even the sweetest pop poison. Maybe it's the fact that, collectively, the echo-chamber atmosphere, the acoustic understatement and the gentle voices (and Sune Rose Wagner's voice is as pretty as Sharin Foo's, but not remotely charismatic or distinctive) sound a little meek, unless you turn it up to eleven and supply your own promo-video clichés.

Driving rain. Neon. Motorcycles. Ominously attractive people with no fixed bedtimes or addresses. You know - in fact, we all know - the drill. And maybe it's the fact that "Pretty In Black"'s apt but predictable cover - The Angels' "My Boyfriend's Back" - adds only a teaspoon of squelching FX and almost no twist to the glorious original. Which makes The Raveonettes essentially a cover band: the coolest cover band ever, possibly, but a tribute act nonetheless.

Ultimately, this suggests our Danish friends aren't so much Lars Von Trier as Wim Wenders and every other European cinema auteur in fatal, foreign thrall to an imaginary America. They're as leather-jacket hip as you like, hang battered Route 66 signs on the walls of their airy continental lofts, keep Harry Dean Stanton's number on speed dial and get all the outlaw/bad-girl details spot-on.

But it's still only make-believe.

    by Jennifer Nine