Like sex, music can often be made even better with constraints. For instance, the Raveonettes produce their best material when Sune Rose Wagner makes himself work resourcefully within specifically defined boundaries. The band's first album, Whip It On, was written entirely in B-flat minor using only three chords, and Wagner and Sharin Foo banned hi-hats and cymbals and capped every song before the three-minute mark, resulting in a consistent gloom that, truth be told, didn't make it any less gimmicky or any more listenable. They fared much better on their major-label debut, Chain Gang of Love, its songs likewise limited to three minutes per song, three chords, and, most critically, B-flat major.
These self-imposed constraints, along with liberal doses of distortion, created an intriguing duality: They put the band closer to their 1950s rock influences and made them sound much more primitive than they actually were, but the scuzziness of their sound also put a modern stance on their backwards glance, making their nostalgia for 50s delinquent cool much more useful than the rampant 60s garage rock retro. For all their reverence for Gene Vincent and namesake Buddy Holly, the Raveonettes weren't revivalists so much as revisionists, retrofitting their rock with all the explicit sexuality and dark violence that 50 years ago could only be conveyed implicitly.
If the Raveonettes adopted any specific musical constraints on Pretty in Black, they're not very evident. Keys vary over the course of the album, and all but three tracks defiantly bound past the three-minute mark. The band has more than doubled in size, growing from a duo into a quintet and allowing Foo to set aside her bass and concentrate on singing. She and Wagner pick up around the same place they left off, with two sex-driven songs that would fit well onto Chain Gang of Love ("Seductress of Bums" and "Love in a Trashcan"), but then, over the course of the album, they gradually widen their scope as they road-test a variety of styles-- SoCal folk rock, fuzzed-out disco, New Wave, Wall of Sound-- and collaborate with some of their forebears, including Suicide's Martin Rev, Velvet Underground drummer Moe Tucker, and Ronnie Spector.
With guests coming over, the Raveonettes have tided up their sound and made it presentable, removing all that screeching feedback in favor of a spic-and-span aesthetic. While such a move seems, in retrospect, inevitable, the spotless production undermines several songs, most notably "Here Comes Mary", highlighting the band's retro contrivances as they merely mimic rather than reimagine their influences.
Wagner and Foo's ambitions, however, produce many inspired moments: "Twilight" pairs an inverted "Twilight Zone" guitar line with a fuzzed-out and sexed-up disco beat. Fortunately, "Sleepwalking" doesn't try to rewrite the Santo & Johnny hit (Modest Mouse beat them to it anyway), but generates a forward-leaning groove that, thanks to Foo's gauzy vocals, sounds almost like shoegazer.
A lovely summer paean, "Ode to L.A." floats aloft on Spector's woah-oh-ohs, despite the fact that her voice has grown grainy with age and she can't hit the notes as confidently as she did with the Ronettes (or even with Eddie Money). Maybe it's that she's singing with a band half her age, but Spector sounds wistful for the past, and this tender nostalgia gives her vocals both a sadness and the authority of experience. Sensing their leading lady's vulnerability, Wagner and Foo wrap the music around her like a warm blanket.
Moments like this instill the Raveonettes' music with something more than easy nostalgia for a sound they're too young to have experienced firsthand. But some constraints might have been useful: Pretty in Black sounds scattershot as Wagner and Foo chase after so many musical styles, some easily captured but others slippery and elusive. Such a pursuit may be admirable and even necessary, but here it creates a diverted and shapeless album that only hints at what they're capable of accomplishing.
