Picture yourself tied to a bed in a motel room in downtown New York in a motley but strangely erotic get-up of rubber and black leather. You might be a director. A movie star. A private detective. A voyeur of sorts. And lying there you are beset by a swarm of pounding, heavy wrist action guitars and hammer beats. The blinds are down and the rain curls like the veins of a neighboring psycho from the ceiling. You are in heaven. You are in hell – you are in the company of The Raveonettes.
With a sound more akin to whiplash than actual rhythm, Denmark’s The Raveonettes are somehow beginning to make a lot of sense. They’re young, they’re beautiful and their signature industrial gothic is tipped to topple The Hives as indie’s coolest euro-export. The sound itself may be rooted in the blood red of eighties and nineties drone rock: Jesus and The Mary Chain, The Cramps, My Bloody Valentine, Mazzy Star et al but there is at the forefront the velvet harmonies of 60’s surf music and the tingling exuberance of The Ronettes. If a transvestite Lou Reed had met Phil Spector in 1959 – this would undoubtedly have been the result.
That Wagner lived for a time in the seedy red light universe of New York City is patently obvious. The record is, for all it’s B-Movie pretensions and monochrome Americana steeped from head to toe in thunder red lipstick and fishnet stockings – as much harlem trash as danish pastry, as much Amelia Copeland as Jack Kerouac, and as much fetish flick as film-noir.