The Raveonettes: Lust Lust Lust : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

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In a previous life, half a century ago, sune Rose Wagner was probably an aspiring Raymond Chandler, churning out tight, bone-hard fiction about rogue gumshoes and icy femmes fatales. In this life, Wagner — the singer-guitarist-songwriter-producer half of Danish duo the Raveonettes — does the same thing in seven-inch-single bites, soaking his short stories of want and danger in fuzz guitars, squealing-tire feedback and his furtive-whisper harmonies with singer-guitarist Sharin Foo. Most of "Aly, Walk With Me," the first song on the Raveonettes' third album, Lust Lust Lust, is as cold and bleak as an all-night stakeout: reverb, a worried-heartbeat pulse and Wagner's and Foo's voices marking the way like torchlight. That is, until the guitars blow in like the Velvet Underground Orchestra.

After the rich synthesis of Sixties girl-group candy, CBGB punk and My Bloody Valentine-style amp howl on their two Columbia albums, Wagner and Foo have gone back to the rougher basics — distortion, echo and monastery-choir vocals — of their debut EP, 2002's Whip It On. But the simplicity is deceptive. Wagner manicures the noise with a light, hip touch — the scraped-treble ripple of the riff in "Lust" sounds like it's slithered in from the 13th Floor Elevators' 1967 album, Easter Everywhere — and the pair makes smart, beguiling combinations of Wagner's open homages to Buddy Holly, the Chiffons and Suicide: the death-march strum and chantlike singing in "Expelled From Love"; the way Foo's harmony hangs, clean and poised, over the white-noise riot of "Blush"; the fast, urgent contradiction of the singing, keyboards and fistfuls of guitar snarl in "Dead Sound," which is anything but. You always get beauty and the beastly, in equal measure — but never the same way twice.