The recycle cycle gets shorter every minute. Pop not only eats itself, it roots in its own spore, and this is the new shit, same as the old shit. Sometimes you can polish an old turd – consider the White Stripes as the new James Chance, The Hives as mAKE Up, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs as Royal Trux, Interpol as Joy Division (or if you like, Into Paradise), the Star Spangles as Johnny Thunders, The Distillers as Hole, The Donnas as The Runaways, The Transplants as Clash, 80s Matchbox B-Line Disaster as the Gun Club. This ain’t rock ‘n’ roll; this is Tokyo karaoke a go-go.
The Raveonettes, well, they have an edge on their contemporaries ’cos they can cite two whole primary sources of inspiration: Suicide and the Jesus & Mary Chain, plus a whole slew of secondary ones (Sonic Youth, the Shangri Las, The Cramps, the Velvets, Eddie Cochran) all rammed into one tune, xeroxed times X.
Now, the carbon paper effect doesn’t bother this writer particularly, but I can see why it turned a fair few punters off Whip It On. And if the three-chords-in-B-Major routine flipped people off over the duration of a mini-album, what would they make of a full CD of the stuff, even if it were only 33 minutes long?
Chain Gang Of Love won’t silence those detractors, but it does showcase Suni Rose Wagner as a pretty nifty writer of two-minute plus pop nuggets. The Suicide elements are mostly stylistic rather than substantial: imagery lifted from some Tim Burton version of West Side Story shockabilly, electro-drones and ‘Rocket USA’ metronomes (although the rhythms also remind us that Mo Tucker was a Bo Diddley-ite). Moreover, they take the Mary Chain’s trick of contaminating the sweetest 60s girly pop with swathes of white noise.
Even then, Wagner’s too much the poptician to sacrifice a perfectly good tune on the altar of noise the way the Reid Bros did with ‘Never Understand’ – his sensibility leans more towards bursts of designer dissonance and distortion acting as antidote to all artificial studio sweeteners, rather than any great Kevin Shields-like addiction to noise. Plus, Sharin Foo does far more than provide the strange and stunning visual interest; her dum-dum basslines power the Raveonettes’ sound, and Suni’s songs would only be half as sweet without her bright light harmony framing his dark melodies.
The net result is as stylised as the sets and costumes in Streets Of Fire. Tunes like ‘The Love Gang’ do to doo-wop as Julee Cruise did on Floating Into The Night – albeit at higher volume and increased BPM: they make it strange and violent, their lens captures flashes of knuckledusters and switchblades smuggled into prom night under fuzzy pink sweaters, the glint of razor blades lacquered into beehive hairdos before the rumble.
So yes, it’s one ring-tone to rule them all, but The Raveonettes can cite the legal precedent of The Ramones versus the states of New York and New Jersey circa 1975 and at least get a hung jury.
If the glove fits, you must acquit. I think they wear it well.