The Raveonettes: Chain Gang Of Love : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Here is one of the most delicious thrills that rock & roll has delivered this year: thirteen songs of love, heartbreak and erotic ambition set to cavernous guitar feedback and drums that throb like Ronnie Spector's hips. The Raveonettes are two Danish troublemakers -- Sune Rose Wagner on guitar and Sharin Foo on bass -- obsessed with pre-Beatles America: Phil Spector, Buddy Holly, B-movie biker flicks, girls in push-up bras waving on teen-boy drag racers. On the surface, their music is all innocence, repression and hand claps that sound like lip smacks. Underneath, the guitars and bass execute dance steps learned from Danish pornography and old Blondie records.

On "Little Animal," Wagner sings about how his girl always wants to fuck, while the guitars drip distortion and the drums make a break for the nearest symphony hall. If he was doomy instead of horny, you'd swear you were listening to the sexiest Jesus and Mary Chain record ever made. In fact, you are. Last year, the Raveonettes announced their love of black leather and garage rock with the eight songs of Whip It On, all of which were droning three-chord rompers in the same minor key, a concept that wore thin on repeated listens. Chain Gang of Love is brighter and better in every way. It is full of delicacy and chaos, and it goes for heart-wrenching grandeur without ever giving in to despair. As the Shangri-Las used to say, this is good bad, not evil.

JOEY LEVY
(RS 931, September 18, 2003)