Reviews of Good Music - The Raveonettes - Lust Lust Lust
I generally don’t like reviews. That’s not to say I don’t do them, because I do. I write lots of reviews. But I don’t like doing it. Reviews, to me, should say more than whether something is of a certain quality. I find those kinds of things a rather large waste of time. However, sometimes I feel a record is worth talking about so much that I want to talk about only it. What’s a column called that only talks about a single record? A review. It’s an inescapable devil, so I’m going to ratify it. When I go out of my way to review an album, it’s because the music is so great I want everyone to hear it. Thereby, I’m appending the word “good” on the end of “music” as you can see on the title above. What you read below is an analysis of some good music. There’s no argument needed preluding the reasons why it is good. It just is.
So.
The Raveonettes - Lust Lust Lust
Every review of every Raveonettes release goes the same way. The band takes Buddy Holly-like lyrics and sexes them up using distortion and zombie-style vocals, creating this fantastic mixture of sleaze, innocence, and nostalgia. They take a surfing film and they paint a coat of pure fuck all over it. Every review explains this because the Raveonettes have done such a great job of explaining themselves. Music journalists often pride themselves on piecing together the etymology of a band, but the Raveonettes have laid it out so clearly that it becomes difficult to break it down further. They are Buddy Holly’s “Let’s Rave On” mixed with the Ronettes. Variances bubble up along the way, but essentially it’s that simple.
I owe the Raveonettes much, let me tell you. Whip It On, their EP from 2002, was transmogrifying for me. It didn’t change how I saw music so much as how I saw the world. Up until then, everything was present-tense. The now was the cheap magazine subscription we all got suckered into, and could never figure out exactly how to escape. Whip It On was the scene in every great b-movie where the bad ass car is introduced. No, it wasn’t the time. It was the car. Whip It On was the bad ass car that I didn’t know I was needed to rescue me from the merciless sleaze of the now.
The first full-length, Chain Gang of Love (2003), was a major label debut and, while it felt similar to Whip It On, it was clearly cleaned up for the mass market. This was my first time experiencing what the system could do to a band. I found precise moments where I could tell the band compromised. Pretty In Black (2005), the next full length, furthered this slide into mainstream sounds to an even greater extent, losing their fuzz entirely and coming across as a throwback band rather than the grayscale motorcade of destruction I knew they could be. It wasn’t that I was losing my precious Raveonettes. I understood that bands go in different directions for any number of reasons (the lack of fuzz was apparently due to their equipment being stolen), and it wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy these records, but neither gave me cause to realize that there was a law in which to fight (even if the law would inevitably win) like Whip It On did.
That brings us to Lust Lust Lust, a revitalization in both sound and philosophy for the band. The fuzz is amplified, as if to remind us how much it was missed. The songs are back down to the three and a half minute mark for the most part. There’s no cutesy covers to be found. This is the full length that should have come after Whip It On. Propulsive yet shifty, direct yet decidedly in the shadows, Lust Lust Lust is the fuck record for the irony-tinged past that never really existed.
“Ally Walk With Me” starts off with a sneer of guitar warm up, scuffing our ears with dust, reminding us that rock music is supposed to be the bad kind of fun. It’s the most telling track, because it’s so laid-back compared to most of Lust Lust Lust. “Ally Walk With Me” takes its time, drawing you into the world, removing consideration and complication. “Dead Sound,” the shoegaze-boogie single I’ve been waiting for since 2003, is built for the post-ironic dance floors of 2008. “Blush” reminds us of the mangled morals in this world: “I can’t keep you/I can’t hold you tight/I can’t love you/see, despite my hurtful ways/I can still make you blush.” “You Want the Candy” gazes with one eye at your childhood innocence and, with the other, winks at your crotch. Finally, “Blitzed” rolls out the Let’s Rave On-style surf-rock, reminding us that there has been a journey between the never that the Raveonettes look back to, and the now they inevitably haunt.
Lust Lust Lust is both saccharine and bloody, hugged by a wall of noise so encompassing speakers barely give it justice. The easy mixtures of reference points may be easy to trace, but that makes it no less futuristic in Lust Lust Lust’s view of the past.
