The Raveonettes - Lust, Lust, Lust

by Jon Fletcher

Lacklustre

"For an album dedicated to sex, it all feels rather disingenuous. If this sort of shallow repetition is all there is to lust for these Danish popsters, they can keep it."

There will be those who mark out ‘Lust, Lust, Lust’ as a work of genius, but we’re not among them. The melodies of 2005’s ‘Pretty In Black’ seem to have been forsaken by The Raveonettes in favour of something altogether more dark and brooding, but the result is like watching a six year old copy a van Gogh.

Opener ‘’Aly Walk With Me’ starts promisingly with a military bombast powered by drums and bass, but the song, like the rest of the album, soon gets bogged down. The reverb and melancholic harmonies generate a smoky, hallucinogenic atmosphere that would form a stunning base to a better album but is instead presented as finished product.

With some albums that don’t immediately grab you, it only takes a few listens to open up hidden treasures. With ‘Lust, Lust, Lust’ though, all you get is a sense of the fraudulent repetition behind the song writing. The Raveonettes have taken the coriander approach to reverb and added it to everything. Over the top, they lay moody but cumbersome vocals, interspersed with lead guitar refrains so simple they could have been produced by an acne-plagued schoolboy, hunched over his forty quid replica Strat in his bedroom, picking out notes for the first time. The laziness of the composition is then hidden behind more delay and reverb.

For an album dedicated to sex, it all feels rather disingenuous. If this sort of shallow repetition is all there is to lust for these Danish popsters, they can keep it.

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