The Raveonettes
Lust Lust Lust
Vice Records
By Eavvon O'Neal
The Raveonettes' structure is no (Danish) national secret. Chord simplicity with ‘50s & '60s rock sensibilities, along with heavy yet equally simplistic drum beats and there you have it. This format can at times be damning, creating a tight, binding element that if overdone can become rudimentary and suffocate a band from existence. Now four albums deep, the Raveonettes has found a way to reside inside their sonically retrospective world and not die a painful music industry death. Lust Lust Lust is the fourth of said catalogue, and shows how roomy minimalism actually is.
After a quick laser zap, you are already inside their distorted world. "Aly, Walk With Me" has the classic feel of a Raveonettes song, with the mid-track feedback to reinforce it. It's followed by the spacey "Hallucinations" with brighter chords and a distorted long off snare. "Lust" has amurky and diluted feel, playing the uncertainty created by the progression well, which in turn sets up pratfall into the similarly ambiguous "Dead Sound." This track has a recurrent feel that is brought back at other moments in Lust Lust Lust, padding an array of notes into your head, which is fantastic because rather than a clear line drawn between which track is which, it’s a familiarity that is pulled from beginning to end of the whole work.
The band works wonders with this drive towards a concise low-fi feeling, and seems to refresh the feelings from Chain Gang of Love without revisiting the questionable moves made on Pretty In Black, a testament to their reassessment abilities. With that, the back half of the album connects into a fantastic pocket that looks relatively limited, but sounds expansive; each track from "Blush" to "The Beat Dies" tyies in so well with the one prior. It’s baffling to think how much material can come from a Velvet Underground-like mentality.
This album on a whole is a sign of comfort, an indication that the walls in which the Raveonettes place around themselves is of firm dedication, not some silk screen to break down once the style is passe or the boys and girls are allowed to play dodge ball together. Lust Lust Lust exemplifies their work, and may be their best yet, a fully-realized album that speaks tomes by saying and doing very little.
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