unny thing about the RED interview with the latest (and hottest…well, half-hottest) garage band to grace America’s shores.

Actually, it’s not that funny. Not that fucking funny at all. My house burned down and I lost the entire interview.

Yeah, I know, it hurts to be this good.

The Raveonettes—not to be confused with any other band that draws its name from a blackbird—hail from Copenhagen, Denmark, and are the best band in the world. In the history of the world. Ever.

If you ask them.

Sharin Foo and Sune Rose Wagner comprise the ultra-simple pop/indie/retro band. Wagner, the skinny, guitar-toting, pensive lead guitarist and backing vocalist could easily be transplanted into any number of post-Weezer’s-Blue Album modern garage bands with his anti-fashion fashion sense and overinflated ego. If I hadn’t lost the interview notes, I would here quote Wagner on his repeated references to his band as the greatest.

Foo, on the other hand, is a wholly undefinable ball o’ energy. Brandishing foreign charm and beauty like a mace, she is liable to either stare at you stoically and never say a word as the cigarette she holds in her hands slowly burns, or she is liable to throw more obscure Hollywood references your way than Jeremy Mathews when he has had just one Tequila Sunrise too many. And she is absolutely stunning, in a very Nordic sort of way.

Honestly, between Foo and Wagner, there is enough postmodern-noir Hollywood knowledge to sink a battleship, and it is that presence of knowledge which almost gives their band legitimacy in a time when few bands have any.

Almost.

See, the kitschy thing about the Raveonettes—named for the enumerable Raveonnes that comprised the American landscape of female pop music in the late 1950s-early 1960s and subsequently are the most significant influence on Foo and Wagner’s style of music—is that they write all their songs in one key.

It’s a clever gag that almost works, and when Foo laughs during her Rolling Stone interview as she says, “No, we’re not into gimmicks,” it’s almost believable.

The band plays a live show full of rockin’ piss and vinegar. Foo and Wagner look like they are in another dimension while they pound the eardrums of club patrons wherever they play. Foo stares above the crowd—never looking at her bass, much less anyone else—and Wagner jumps around on stage spontaneously enough for me to believe that, at least when he played in Salt Lake City at the Zephyr Club on July 16, his guitar was sending electronic shocks through his fingertips ar random times to make sure he was awake.

This Swedish musical duo is intense - and intensly committed to creating songs that adhere to their strict, self-imposed limits...but does it work?

I can see how that’d be a real problem. What the Raveonettes seem to have done best of all is confuse the American press and public that their ultra-simple brand of music actually drains from their impressive well of talent. In other words, the Raveonettes seem to be wasting their classically trained potential on obsolete music. No matter how cool it is that the band plays all songs in one key, when looked at logically, it seems like an avant-guard poet writing with only one key on his typewriter—indeed, it may be cool for a second, but there are only so many possibilities.

Regardless, despite their inevitable fall from grace if the Raveonettes do not manage to change their tune (literally), their tour with the L.A.-based, moody glam rockers, the Warlocks, is bound to be a success. The two bands complement each other well, as the Warlocks brood with pensiveness as the crowd sways with their crazy beat—something resembling the music that would be created by the weirdo love child born of Pink Floyd, The Cure and Alkaline Trio—the Raveonettes follow up with the aural-abrasion which has apparently made them famous.

Rock ’n’ roll may not be dead, but pay attention to make sure it isn’t sleeping either.
eryn@red-mag.com