hey kids- its surf fun with tenderness and feedback!

nothing captures desolation so well as singalong choruses and walls of guitar-skerang. this is music to nod off to– not that nodding off is a valid past-time, but there is something particularly isolated about the raveonette‘s latest that suits those last few minutes of blissed out consciousness, before we fade to black.

i’m not a dedicated fan, so i can’t compare it to their last however-many albums. i know they’re scandinavian, but i refuse to compare them to other contemporaries. ok, except maaaaaybe peter, bjorn and john, as they seem to have a similar love of meloncholy melodies– oh yeah, and talent. 

so for the un-initiated such as myself, the best way to think of the album is somewhere between jesus and mary chain’s earlier work and … the shangri las, maybe? particularly on ‘black satin’ (just like honey) and perhaps more knowingly on ‘you want the candy’.

so why listen when you’ve heard it all before? well, it’s hard to pin down…

i think lust lust lust has nailed what a lot of people missed about the point of rock’n’roll and goth: a twisted sense of humour that embraces the wrongs of life, love, sex, death and ourselves, and laughs a-ha-long with the joke that it all is.

it’s ironic that bands like the raveonettes are labelled as “derivative” and “tributary” yet they’re now making better music in the vein of their influences than all the re-formed “originals” doing the zombie tour circuit right now.

i would liken the production (for those of you that can remember) to roller-skating around at the end of the night to the last few tracks in an empty concrete skating-rink. as the PA craps out, your dodgy rented metal skates wear down to their tinny little axles and the sparks begin to really fly. then just as you get lulled into a comfortable side to side rhythm, that piercing feedback rises up and hits you in the face like cold 3am concrete.

so slap it on, any time you’re up or down and sigh sigh sigh. best played loud! 

MP3: the raveonettes – aly, walk with me 

:: nurse nos

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