The Raveonettes
I’m not sure how popular these guys are at the moment, but The Raveonettes slowly seem to be turning into one of those consistently good career bands. They’ve never really repeated themselves, they’ve shown endurance when so many of their contemporaries have vanished, and although they rarely hit the giddiest of heights, they seldom disappoint.
At the moment, instead of an album, they’re in the process of releasing a series of EPs, including a dreaded remix EP. This approach is something I really like because I’m a big fan of the EP; between four and eight tracks is about what I’m into at the moment.
They’ve moved on from their distorted rock ‘n’ roll, and now seem to be applying the Raveonettes treatment to eighties synth-based indie. It’s all been butchered, ground up and fed back, so it’s far from a pastiche but they definitely do seem to enjoy embracing a style wholesale, and then completely perverting it.
I won’t come out and say that the Raveonettes are my favourite band in the whole world, nor that this is the most staggering piece of work anyone is going to produce this year, but it’s another good, solid effort by a band I have never really stopped liking. Perhaps their early stuff was the most feral and the most gripping, but since then they have consistently challenged themselves and consistently evolved, all the while generating good records which seems to be far harder than you would think, when you look at how few groups seem to be able to manage it.
The Raveonettes – Way Out There (from Beauty Dies)
The Raveonettes – The Thief (from Sometimes They Drop By)
Aha -first comment prize?
Interesting what you say about liking EP-sized bunches of music. That’s what’s been happening to me recently too. I’m not quite sure why that is, but maybe something to do with the sheer amount of music available. I do feel a bit guilty about listening to one band and being impatient to get to the next one though.
And The Raveonettes? Never really given them a proper outing, but cheers Mathew. Time I did I guess.
Well I’ve said it to other people in the past, but EPs seem to be a little easier to keep control of, both for the artist and for the listener. They can be more coherent, tighter, more of a unit, I suppose. And they don’t tend to be as likely to suffer from song 9 concentration span issues.
I wouldn’t touch them with a bargepole – horrible, stuck up, prima donna, waste of space fuckers.
the other half of & I put a gig on for them about 5 or so years back & they arrived in a gust of Stars In The Making & then proceeded to “talk to the hand” everyone (including us, the promoters, & the sound engineer who was trying to get them to soundcheck). They set their gear up & plugged a vintage ’50s valve amp (with an American plug + UK adapter, as far as I remember) into an extension lead & within 5 minutes the valve amp set on fire, from not being able to cope with the voltage, & was completely fucked. The band just looked at the fire &, honestly this was funny, jumped up & down screaming that their baby weas on fire. When WE put the fire out the band went ballistic – blaming the sound engineer, the other half of, me, the electric supplier, everyone except themselves. After that they ignored everyone, did a shitty awful set & fucked off without speaking to any of the people who had specifically travelled up from London to see them.
I might be missing out on a decent series of tracks by ignoring them but I’m happy to break the ‘don’t let it get personal’ rule on this one. Fuckers cost us a lot of money to bring them to Cardiff, even back then, & they were genuine cunts.
I remember you guys talking about that incident the other week on the Waiting Room.
Isn’t nice how – a few years down the line – you can look back on it all and laugh?…
Harsh, DC. Harsh but fair.
That’s quite enough of them, then.
That was the calm version, Toad.
I like the Raveonettes, have seen them on 5 or 6 occassions at King Tut’s and did not experience the same attitude as DC, in fact a couple of times Sune was sitting at the bar downstairs having a beer and chatting and Sharin was manning the merchandise stall. They always seem to enjoy King Tuts and can honestly say that I haven’t heard a bad gig by them.
Well it’s far from impossible that they’ve either grown up or calmed down a bit, especially given they’re a bit more niche these days, and obviously not going to be superstars.
Absolutely. I mean, I was talking 5 or 6 years ago when this happened, so these days I imagine they are quite differently behaved. They could be the nicest, sweetest people in the whole of the bloody buggering world now. But, frankly, fuck ‘em. They have the very rare honour of pissing me off to such an extent I’m quite prepared to be publicly childish about it & never listen to them again.