I’ve enjoyed The Raveonettes in the past, but it’s always been a casual thing. I obviously love bands who work off the Phil Spector wall of sound template, which The Raveonettes do quite well. But they always seemed just a little bit too keen on making noise. I’m not tremendously enthusiastic about big doses of feedback in any case and I found their motions in that direction to be particularly offputting.
So I picked up Lust Lust Lust way back in May and found it pleasant enough. I wanted no part of the lead single “Aly Walk With Me” which is dreary, repetitive, droning, and suffers from an especially repellant case of the above-noted problem. Still, there were a few nice songs, so I made a note to myself to post about it.
But then the summer posting doldrums hit and it was just never a high priority. So it kept getting shuffled back until almost six months had passed. That happens all the time. I’ve got literally hundreds of bands I have a theoretical intention to post about, but who I will never actually cover. It’s what happens when you run a music blog as a hobby and have a lot of other things to keep you busy. It’s also a de facto form of quality control. Occasionally a fancy-of-the-moment track or two will make it through but for the most part you can be sure that if I’m posting something here it’s because I genuinely love it and listen to it obsessively.
But a funny thing happened with this one. I kept finding myself coming back. More and more of the songs were revealing their secrets to me.
So suddenly I find myself realizing that an album I had quickly dismissed as good but nothing special is likely to be among my favorites of the year. And the more I think about it, the more I think this demonstrates the significanceof song order.
Because, really, there’s only two songs I don’t like: “Aly Walk With Me” and “Lust.” The problem is that they’re among the first three tracks, and so they influenced me perception of the tone for the whole record.
These are dark, dangerous sounding songs. There’s less a “wall of sound” as much as there are these sparsely decorated, almost austere tracks that punctuate themselves by collapsing all the sound in upon you. The result is a strangely claustrophobic feel. In terms of sound textures, it’s fascinating stuff. But as far as the melody goes: it doesn’t appeal to me not in the slightest.
The rest of the album, however, is far more expansive. The sounds are large, they overflow the speakers, the distortion constantly threatens to drown out the words. There are songs that rush past you in a torrent of guitar swells and drum cascades (“Dead Sound,” “Blush,” “I Want The Candy”). There are others that opt for a slower pace, but maintain the same fulsome character (“I Closed My Eyes,” “Black Satin,” “Expelled From Love”). And underneath all of it is a melody that would do The Ronettes proud. The result is a record that scoffs at restraints, that explodes like fireworks, that is gone before you can hardly tell.
I knew that there were plenty of decent songs, but it took months of nudging from my subconscious to alert me to the explosive wonder that is “Blitzed,” or help me to notice just how astonishing it is when the chorus first makes itself known in “Blush,” or to extract the second track “Hallucinations” – an absolute jewel of a song – from in between its two bleak and tedious compatriots.
But it’s all so delicately balanced that I somehow managed to avoid really hearing any of this for months. Those two tracks established a frame of reference that locked in my capacity to respond to the rest of the record.
But the thing is, I think those early tracks are designed to do exactly that. They clearly are meant to establish a tone, to set the stage for the rest. To make it clear that this is the kind of record that hits you with force, to give a backdrop which will prevent the sweetness of the later tracks from going overboard.
It’s just that I’m not actually the target here. All I want is the candy – I don’t want the warning at the beginning to dampen my mood – I just want to let myself drift free in the blissed out waves. I guess it all goes to show that first impressions sometimes let you down. And that sometimes you can love a record in spite of what the artists are actually trying to do with it.