Raveonettes take matters into their own four hands

The Danish pair have gained their independence and a new lusty sound.

By JOHN BENSON

VINDICATOR CORRESPONDENT

When a band names its album “Lust Lust Lust,” you better believe there’s something going on with its members.

“I tend to go off on some crazy binges once in a while to get inspiration,” said The Raveonettes singer-guitarist-songwriter Sune Rose Wagner, calling from Copenhagen. “So I go at it for a month or two, and I’m pretty much full of crazy stories and weird ideas about life and love, and especially lust.”

For The Raveonettes, whose new album “Lust Lust Lust” is due out Nov. 5, band visionary Wagner went on a quest to experience and examine the dark side of American society. That meant spending a good amount of time on the coasts.  

“New York City is a very inspiring city to me,” Wagner said. “I also used Los Angeles, which I think is a lot darker, more isolated and can be quite evil. I use it more in almost like a mythological kind of sense. Los Angeles has always been to me the end of the world.

“You can’t really get any farther out west, and the sun is setting right there. It just seems like it truly is the end of the world. It’s like a scary isolated kind of feeling, and that’s very inspiring to me.”

Stylistically, the City of Angels provides the foundation for the surf guitar sound found on “Lust Lust Lust.” Then there’s the Big Apple influence, which supplies a grimy sense. New track “With My Eyes Closed” features the former sound, while “Aly Walk With Me” captures the latter. But why call the album “Lust Lust Lust?”

“Lust is really the main theme of the album,” Wagner said. “It’s definitely the one deadly sin that keeps popping up in every single song. So I didn’t want to come up with a fancy title where we’re trying to be artsy. I just thought what would Andy Warhol do? He’d just repeat it like 36 times, but I didn’t want to do that, so I just repeated it three times.”

You get the sense that Wagner is hoping to distance The Raveonettes from its fuzzed out, short pop song past. Not only does the new album contain a five-minute song (“Aly Walk With Me”), but the group’s ’50s balladry — which seemed omnipresent on its earlier releases — isn’t as prevalent.

More so, Wagner talks about how The Raveonettes, which returns to Cleveland today for a show at the Beachland Ballroom, is finally on its own. Free from a stateside recording contract, the Danish duo — Wagner and Sharin Foo (bass, vocals) — for the first time is now able to have complete control over how it’s positioned.

With such independence comes responsibility, but Wagner needs only to look back at the band’s last studio effort, 2005’s “Pretty in Black,” to see how things could be different.

“That was a very good album, but I don’t think it was promoted very well,” Wagner said. “I thought there was a lot of miscommunication going on.”

He quickly added, “This time we’re taking matters into our own hands.”