The Raveonettes at Neumos
November 11th, 2009
The Raveonettes were a blitzkrieg of light, smoke, and sound last Friday night. The sleek, beautiful duo tantalized the audience by starting off with a new song, “Gone Forever”, then followed with a handful of older tunes, including “Lust”, “Black Satin” and “Dead Sound” from Lust Lust Lust. I didn’t pay much attention to the crowd, but their electricity after each song matched watt-for-watt with the onslaught of blinking strobe lights. The band, too, seemed to harvest energy from the eye-popping display of wavelength radiation.
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There wasn’t much chit-chat from Sune Rose Wagner or Sharin Foo, content instead to let their guitars do the talking, or screeching, as it were. If they were going to get through a set with 20+ songs, they had better get to work. On “Break Up Girls!”, Wagner and Foo’s abrasive opening stanza was followed with a minimal, dub-worthy heartbeat. The already-sparse song was stripped to the ankles and sounded even starker. The strobes really kicked into gear at this juncture. Foo climbed behind the stand-up drum kit for “The Beat Dies” and “Heart of Stone” (supplanting whoever it was behind there already), and showed off her multi-instrument prowess. I could really only make out her stick-straight blond hair bobbing about in the background.
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The crowd got a little busier when “D.R.U.G.S.” began, a song I thought was dancier in nature than much of their catalog. Heads and hands moved as spotlights scanned the floor. To my extreme satisfaction, they played one of their best songs (was there any doubt?), “Love In a Trashcan”, from 2005′s Pretty In Black. It’s just such a supremely bad-ass song, with it’s simple surf-pop chords tingling and mingling with the faux-triangle keyboard syncopation. The requisite sleazy, trashcan lyrics most definitely apply.
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In the “Seattle moment” of the evening, Wagner heartily dedicated the song “Boys Who Rape (Should All Be Destroyed)” (subtle, huh?) to their friends 7-Year Bitch and Mia Zapata. Zapata, of course, was the vocalist for the Gits and raped and murdered in Seattle in 1993. The pre-encore set concluded with “Suicide”, another girl-centric song of power, and “Aly, Walk With Me”, the darkest and most foreboding song the Raveonettes have written.
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