Review: The Raveonettes - Raven in the Grave

Artist: The Raveonettes
Title: Raven in the Grave
Format: Full-length
Year: 2011
Label: Vice Music
Genre: Shoegaze
Rating: 81 / 100

The Raveonettes are a Danish duo who are at the moment one of the main acts responsible for keeping shoegaze alive and kicking. Their music has often been described as quite The Jesus and Mary Chain'ish. Don't trust people who do, because this band stands at a fairly big distance from acts like these. In my humble opinion The Raveonettes have always had a very own style of playing this kind of music, being a very fine addition to modern shoegaze and noise pop music.

Some weeks ago I announced a new The Raveonettes album which would be released somewhere this spring, well, don't look any further, here it is. They named it Raven in the Grave and is again full of songs played in the way The Raveonettes are used to; slightly dreamy, sometimes fuzzy rock music, which again is able to evoke that feeling which was once evoked by bands in the late 80's. Fortunately they don't get any further than an 80's "feeling", their music is full of so much more, there is post-rock'ish romanticism, chillwave'ish sensualism, some occasionally appearing electronics, male/female vocal harmony and fuzzed-to-the-top hazy lead guitar melodies, alltogether making the overall sound pretty one of a kind.

What distinguishes a great album from a good album for me is a bit continuity; an album on which every song has its own special reason for being awes0me, unfortunately this album lacks a bit too much of the aforementioned continuity to really be called great instead of good. There are some really amazing tracks (Ignite, Recharge & Revolt and Evil Seeds), but there are a just too much tracks that could be considered as fillers (for example Apparitions and Summer Moon), and to be fair, those just pull the joy of listening a bit down.

Still, I will rate this 81 / 100, for those absolutely amazing songs present on this album, it just could be a lot higher if the rest of the album would be just as awes0me. Because every sweetheart visiting this blog deservers to hear some of that mentioned awes0meness:


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Selwin.