The Raveonettes: Interview/Feature (Boston Phoenix, 1/09/09

Kicking the habits: The Raveonettes change (for a change)

I can't be the only one who, asked to name the most face-melting guitar moment in the last couple of years of recorded music, would point to the 1:57 mark (and onward) of "Aly, Walk with Me," the opening track on the Raveonettes' 2007 release Lust Lust Lust. It's a loud, soul-shattering, noteless vortex of feedback that multiplies and divides like the edge of a fractal as viewed through a thousand tiny mirrors, and it occurs in what is an otherwise baleful and Nick Cavey funereal trudge.

"I'm just so happy that we were able to capture that sound with that take," explains guitarist and songwriter Sune Rose Wagner. "We used to have a lot of songs back in the days before we recorded that were very dissonant, but I think we felt that we wanted to be more of a melodic band and to have a nice melody that would create tension with the noise. I don't think that we can make a more harsh noise than the one on 'Aly, Walk with Me' — it's kind of a pinnacle, for us, of the whole noise thing, that's going to be a very hard one to top. I don't know if we want to try it again. But it's a beautiful sound."

Anyone familiar with Wagner's œuvre with the Raveonettes (who come to the Paradise next Thursday) should be surprised by the idea that, having created something awesome, he's ready to move on to something different. His successful and brutally stylish rock duo exploded out of Copenhagen in the early naughts, armed with tasteful worn-on-sleeve influences that highlighted both his switchblade six-string Jesus-and-Mary-Chain-isms and vocalist Sharin Foo's Nico-esque ice-queen charm. They proceeded to churn out record after record of high quality and consistent sound. Has he become unstuck?

"I think we have done a lot of — well, I don't want to say the same things, but I think that we have taken a lot of our early influences, like '60s girl groups, Buddy Holly, Sonic Youth, and used them a lot. And I don't really know if it's interesting to keep going down that same road. I mean, I'm just as crazy about a band like the Doors as I am about Buddy Holly, even though they're completely different things. And you know, I love a lot of music from the '70s and '80s — influences that normally wouldn't show up in our songs."

Early on, the Raveonettes put self-conscious constraints on their work: their first EP, 2002's Whip It On, is, as it says on the album cover, "recorded in glorious B-flat minor," and their follow-up LP, 2003's Chain Gang of Love (the cover of which features Wagner and Foo done up in '50s Wild One gear), is "recorded in B-flat major"; neither record offers any song that surpasses the 3:15 mark. As with the Dogme 95 movement of filmmaker and fellow Dane Lars von Trier, these limits were imposed to focus the duo's creative energies. "Without constraints, you run the risk of having the whole thing fall apart. It's more of having creative constraints on yourself — and that's what we wanted. We always strived to be something other than an ordinary rock band."

Over time, however, the ordinary caught up with them. "I think that in the beginning we did an incredible amount of touring, and it was very unhealthy. We ended up playing a lot of shows that we didn't really care about, and I think that, you know, people could see that! I guess now we have to rebuild our reputation as a live band. Fortunately, we're totally into touring now, and getting a lot better. I'm enjoying it now, but for a while when we were on tour all we wanted to do was sit at home and write pop, you know?"

Wagner isn't kidding about sitting home writing pop: the band's current bicoastal set-up means that "I'll write songs at home, and when I have songs that I think are good for us, I'll send them to her [Foo] and get her opinion on them, and she'll say what she likes about it and what she doesn't like about it." While he's writing the songs alone in New York, Foo is raising her newborn baby on the West Coast. It's proved to be their greatest challenge. "To make the new album, first off we need to have discussions," Wagner continues. "Discussions help Sharin and me come up with something interesting. I do miss, sometimes, being in the same city, because you can resolve things much faster face to face."

The four EPs they released in 2008 showcase a looser outfit willing to experiment not just with noise but with dancebeat tropes (as on the Sometimes They Drop By EP) as well as trance and synth work (as on the Beauty Dies EP). "Yeah, it's nice — doing the EPs, we felt like we could pretty much do whatever we wanted to do. Like this song called 'Young and Beautiful' [off Beauty Dies], which is very much an '80s song with a keyboard line in it. The good thing about that is that you don't have to have 10 or 12 songs that have to be consistent together. You can write whatever comes to mind, whatever you're in the mood for. I like both things, though: the freedom of the EPs and the challenge of making a proper album."

Those shifts to moments of pure psych on Lust Lust Lust were a turning point in Wagner's getting back into the swing of playing live again. "For that record, I used the same set-up that I always use, but it's all how you work it. It's just the way that the guitars play, it comes out different every time, and I love that. It's what's so great about playing live. When you're playing loud, you never know what it's going to sound like. The way the room is, the way you stand — I love the way you just never know."

THE RAVEONETTES | Paradise, 967 Comm Ave, Boston | January 15 at 8 pm | $16.50 | 617.562.8800 or www.thedise.com

Year In National Pop: New Attitudes (Boston Phoenix, 12/22/08

Are we fated to pretend?

Music is a drug, as they say, distorting perception and shaping reality into æsthetically appropriate patterns and themes. In heady times like these, it can be a real trip to look back through the past year and see what our musical idols were telling us about ourselves all along — whether showing us our most craven inner id, or echoing the cynicism that grows in our hearts as we react to the madness around us. As MGMT said in one of the most beguilingly mind-bending pop moments on record this year, "We're fated to pretend."

The interface between reality and fantasy is almost always a war zone in contemporary rap, but this year it felt as if the fantasy were ready to snap. Rap's sonic frontier shifted radically, as the legal hazards of sampling meant that most rappers had to get by with synths and beatboxes. Whereas KANYE WEST's new digital sobfest 808s and Heartbreak faltered, other rappers were able to make spare production work. "It ain't frontin' if you got it" is a line uttered in two Top 10 rap tunes this year: LIL WAYNE's "A Milli" and T.I.'s "Whatever You Like," both straightforward odes to being rich and getting laid, in that order. T.I.'s song is particularly epic and seductive, if only because its brazen fantasy is so tawdry and false: when he offers to "gas up the jet tonight and you can go wherever you like," he seems to forget not only the then-$4-a-gallon gas tariff but also his own ankle-cuffed house arrest.

"Whatever You Like" was eventually dethroned from the #1 spot on the Billboard "Hot 100" by another T.I. smash, his duet with RIHANNA, "Live Your Life," a song equally obsessed with the twin goals of reaching for the stars and making that paper, with, at the beginning, T.I.'s somewhat contradictory spoken exhortation to "stop lookin' at what you ain't got and start bein' thankful for what you do got." T.I.'s success here hinges on his understanding that the goal of a pop song is to put the zeitgeist in a blender and hit "puree." "Live Your Life" does that with gusto — did I mention that it's dedicated to "all my soldiers over there in Iraq"? Of course, it doesn't really matter what you're singing or rapping about if you have Rihanna. Which may explain why "Live Your Life" was one of three #1 hits Rihanna had in a year where she didn't even put an album out. The 20-year-old Barbadian is the bellwether of a trend in superdivas where the ability to get a tell-tale sing-along hook on the radio is more crucial than the ability to display a multi-octave voice or manufacture lyrical introspect.

If there was one constant in 2008's pop sweepstakes, it was the rapid ascent of female solo artists willing to toe the line between pop diva and electroclash queen. The ubiquity in 2007 of Daft Punk and Justice seems to have emboldened a new generation of producers to harshen up the beats of dance pop and add some grit to tween pop. How else explain the jolting dance rock of, say, MILEY CYRUS's "Fly on the Wall" (on the otherwise turgid Breakout), or BRITNEY SPEARS's über-catchy "Womanizer"? The thing about diva pop is that as pop music (somehow) becomes more flagrantly sexual, the hand tips toward female artists who know how to channel that sexual energy into a dance vibe. Which means that even an ode to being cheated on (like "Womanizer") or a diatribe against an ex who couldn't commit (like BEYONCÉ's tribal detonator "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)") can be a banger if there's enough sass and 'tude thrown in.

This new attitude also opened the door to newcomers (with the right producers). I was particularly impressed with a number of production jobs by French electro-shocker SPACE COWBOY, who worked magic for ennui-laden British tartNADIA OH (with her offhandedly slut-tastic "My Egyptian Lover" off her Hot Like Wow album) and especially rising starLADY GAGA(whose album title The Fame could be prophetic if enough people hear glam-slam-thank-you-ma'am smashes-in-waiting like "Starstruck," "Just Dance," and "Poker Face"). Of course, the story of the year in terms of sassy chicks being provocative isKATY PERRY, who turned her back on her strict religious background just long enough to pen her ode to making out with another girl as long as her boyfriend doesn't mind, "I Kissed a Girl."

Meanwhile, the more accessible acts of the underground seemed intent on reanimating the corpse of the '80s. M83's lauded Saturdays = Youth whooshed listeners back to their respective proms with its John-Hughes-soundtrack-that-never-was. New Zealand oddball Pip Brown a/k/a LADYHAWKE put together a stunning pastiche of invented '80s-isms, creating anthemic dance pop that rocks hard and mopes harder — like Bananarama fronting Depeche Mode. And São Paulo players CSS continued to party all over the world on Donkey, with their increasingly sophisticated synth/guitar rock/pop carried aloft by lead singer Lovefoxxx's mix of innocent ineptitude and charming viciousness. Brooklyn'sGANG GANG DANCE departed from their formless morass of wordless space jams to merge sparkling washes, weightless euphoria, worldbeat-inflected gaiety, and sex-starved dance-floor whump on Saint Dymphna.

When pop music is at its giddiest, heavy metal can be depended on to bum everyone back down to earth, and the newMETALLICA record would do just that if it weren't so thrilling to hear these dudes defiantly back in the saddle again. Sounding like the by-product of a series of stern talkings-to, Death Magnetic sees Hetfield, Ulrich, and company return to the Black Forest guitar romanticism so painfully missing from the ugly-sounding records they've pumped out over the past two decades. If they're still coming at you with songs about suicide, war, depression, and anger, at least they do so within the confines of tightly arranged jams and unbelievably gratifying waves of rockitude. But whereas Metallica got real, the rest of the metal world continued to get more unreal.AMON AMARTH and the SWORD continued in the vein of 2007's top metallers, High on Fire and Mastodon, constructing elaborate mythologies to deepen their prog-metal labyrinths. The result is accomplished stoner thrash with song titles you can barely pronounce (e.g., the Sword's axis-shifting single from '08's Gods of the Earth, "Fire Lances of the Ancient Hyperzepherians").

And whereas metal has become more knotted and complex, so much of what used to be called "indie rock" has become contemplative. The patience required of metal fans in recent years to make it through tedious works by Sunn O))) and Earth has now beset the not-quite-rock world. Plodding gorgeousness permeated new works by indie luminariesBEACH HOUSE,PORTISHEAD, and the BUG, to name a few. Meanwhile, the runaway success this year of newcomers FLEET FOXES — with their winsomely anachronistic CSNY-meets-Appalachia — was a resounding victory for the twin indie virtues of preciousness and perceived authenticity. But I was most impressed with the back-to-nature lushness ofMERCURY REV's Snowflake Midnight, wherein the band used programmed beats and a myopic obsession with the natural world to shed their previously annoying Flaming Lips–isms and discover an X'd-out bliss. It's like catharsis on tape.

"Can't Be Bought, Can't Be Sought": Maiden, Priest, Sabbath, and Walt Disney: Metal In Middle Age (Boston Phoenix, 2/27/08)

Watching Iron Maiden last week, I was struck by something that might seem like an odd thought: “Wow, people seem to *really* love Iron Maiden!” This might seem like kind of a duh, but when you consider how thoroughly this audience knew every word and every lick of these songs, and when you consider that Iron Maiden shirt-wearing had saturated a good 80% of the audience market, you begin to get a grip on the sheer adulation this band gets from its audience.



A lot was made of how no one liked their last tour, where they played their new album in its entirety. Although there was groaning from metal hipsters and ironists, though, at the show last year from my seats all I could sense was that everyone else around me had really done their homework: everyone there seemed to know every word and air-guitar riff from the new album. As an aside, at an Iron Maiden show a few years ago, I witnessed a sight that I will definitely take to my grave: in front of me for most of the show were two teenage boys air-guitaring along to every moment; and in the middle of one song, I swear I witnessed one of the boys correct the other one’s air-guitaring, as in “No, it doesn’t go like this, it goes like this.” Genius.

Anyway, my theory on Maiden is that they took the molten confusion of 60’s and 70’s rock culture and made a Disneyland attraction/ride out of it, with a degree of opera-derived camp that wasn’t far off from the then-ongoing Ice Capades craze and presaged the 90’s and 00’s Broadway musical trend. They also aren’t far off from the intents of the original Disneyland: pillage folklore and myth and create a technically masterful piece out of each one. The same way that a kid in the 70’s probably knew of Snow White and Pinocchio through the Disney animated films, a metal fan in the 80’s probably was more aware of “The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner”, “The Loneliness of The Long Distance Runner”, and Winston Churchill’s infamous “We shall go on to the end” speech from Iron Maiden’s records than from their sources.

Maiden of course come from a pre-Internet world where knowledge of arcane tales was cool, and it was ultimately the same world where Dungeons & Dragons could flourish unironically. It's hard to remember a time where Area 51 and Roswell was not common knowledge, and instead of wikipedia'ing "Alexander The Great" you might have to go to a library and look something up in an encyclopedia, which is pretty much what it sounds like they did when writing said tune.



Metal and indeed rock in general has always plundered history and culture for source material, but in some ways the brazen way in which Maiden appropriated/pillaged was just in line with the burgeoning culture of “metal” from its origins on. We all know about Zep’s swipes from Lord of the Rings (not to mention Rush’s subsequent swipes from the same) and the way that Sabbath’s very name is from the 1963 Boris Karloff/Mario Bava horror flick (imagine how pretentious metal would have become if the Sabs had named themselves after the film’s original Italian title, I tre volti della paura) – but it’s arguable that neither of these bands had their sights set on the cohesive branding that a band like Maiden would later put together. Although the Sabs did pull the hat trick of same-song-name/band-name/album-name on their debut (which Maiden would of course pull themselves), Satanism and black masses was surprisingly not necessarily an ongoing lyrical preoccupation for the band, and in the end they are essential celebrated for being a great rock/metal band.



If the genesis theory of metal begins with the holy trinity of Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and (always in third) Deep Purple, then it’s pretty understood that the second coming involves the Beatles/Stones dialectic of Maiden and Priest. And while Judas Priest were arguably campier, more flamboyant, and more aggressively “metal”, Iron Maiden have always stood for ideals that will forever define what metal is for generations of kids: large themes, grand scales, and straight-up fantasy.

You see, the rock crit line has always been that metal is part of a long line of androgynous sashayers drawing from such disparate sources as David Bowie, Peter Gabriel, Mick Jagger, etc: and indeed, you could pick a few points on the graph and show a straight line from, say, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins to Freddie Mercury to Ian Anderson’s cod-piece to Rob Halford to pretty much any emo-metaller nowadays—however, this emphasis on androgyny only works if you think that metallers are all about creating confusion and exploring society’s grey areas and dark themes, which works fine until you attempt to fit Iron Maiden in the equation, and then it all falls to shit. Why? Because Maiden are the wholesome and unconfused literalists in a sea of metal fatigue and ephemeral metaphor-peddlers.

Black Sabbath’s most enduring hit is a song called “Paranoid”. It was famously written quickly, lyrics and music, and as such it doesn’t entirely make a whole lot of sense. The word “paranoid” is never used in the song, and indeed it could have probably been called any number of other names and worked just as well. It isn’t a meditation on the concept of paranoia or anything, it’s a confused and emotional tune of heartbreak and emotional numbness; it’s lead guitar break is so fuzzed-out and jarring that it has always sounded, to me, like when you are trying to talk in a dream and can’t quite make the words out. Ultimately, the underlying theme of the majority of Black Sabbath tunes is “frustration”.



This is no longer true by the time you get to Maiden and Priest. Priest worked hard at being self-consciously “metal”, with lyrics and imagery that attempt to unite its teen fanbase in a leather-clad army of teen rebels. Priest’s mascot is a creature called The Metallion: never mentioned in song but adorning the cover of “Defenders of the Faith” as an art deco demon, he is part of the overall attempt by Priest to create metal myths with intimidating creatures meant to represent the power of their teen following. Songs like “United” especially lay bare the band’s naked thirst for fomenting teen rebellion.



Priest’s main weapon of coercion is sexual predation: if you didn’t know Halford was gay during Priest’s heyday, you would at least have known, by a cursory perusal of their tuneage, that the guy was as sexually aggressive as Freddie Mercury before him. It’s just a fine line between the aggressive camp of Queen’s “Tie Your Mother Down” and Priest’s PMRC-targeted tune “Eat Me Alive”. “I’m going to force you at gunpoint!”



It’s clear that Halford, closeted at the time, was trying to test the bounds of what he could get away with without giving the game away, and his hypersexuality in the band lent them their individuality and force. The opposite is true of Maiden: their tunes are completely devoid of any sexual content at all (unless you count a song about Jack The Ripper as sexual). Instead, Iron Maiden systematically work through coherent themes, and attempt to turn those themes into exciting showpieces. This approach worked to limited means with first singer Paul Di’Anno on their first two albums; although Di’Anno had a powerful presence that worked within the milieu of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal that Maiden ostensibly came out of, his limited range meant that he could never take the songs to the stratospheric heights of Maiden’s 70’s heroes, bands with banshee shriekers like Zep, Deep Purple, UFO, Uriah Heep, etc.



(As an aside, I’d like to offer a quick defense of the rock band Uriah Heep. Sometimes people don’t realize that in order for the rock behemoths of today to exist, many others had to fall by the wayside to make the current ascendancy possible. This is especially true for a band like Heep, whose supernatural lyrical preoccupations, impossibly tight arrangements, blazing fretwork, extended themes, and glass-shattering approach to vocal histrionics not only laid a straight-up blueprint for Iron Maiden, but for metal itself. Laugh all you want, but the Heep delivered.)



Anyway, once Maiden had Dickinson, they finally had everything in place to take "satanic" metal mainstream: compare “Number of the Beast”, from Dickinson’s first LP with the band, to, say, the self-titled Sabbath tune, and you can see Maiden’s genius: whilst Sab’s tune is a dirgey testament to self-flagellation and eternal damnation, with a lone tri-note theme encapsulating seven centuries of banned music into a singular ode to one man’s shame and torment, Maiden’s tune is pure voyeurism: the protagonist witnesses the sights and sounds of a black mass. “6! 6! 6! / The number of the beast! / Sacrifice is going on tonight!”

In song after song, Maiden created self-contained worlds that act as adaptations of themes. "Flight of Icarus", "The Prisoner" (after the 60's British TV show), "Transylvania", "Quest For Fire", "To Tame A Land" (a ditty about Frank Herbert's Dune), "The Phantom Of The Opera", etc are straight-forward stories being told, with no real metaphor or hidden meaning at all. "Number Of The Beast" isn't an investigation of evil, or a metaphor for the modern day's banality of cruelty, or any of those things: it is a straightforward account of a black mass.

This is unusual for the world of the pop song, where everything is buried within symbolism and hidden meanings; but it is not unusual for the world of musicals and opera, which is really aesthetically where Maiden are coming from. From where I was sitting last week, Maiden's pageantry of themes and settings is like nothing so much as when one enters the hallowed halls of Disneyland, and sees this:

Rock, and metal in particular, is about harnessing the power of rock, and presenting that power in as big a way as possible. In a post-Disney world, where spectacle, imagery, symbolism stripped of context, and the history of the world and its mythology can be reshaped and represented at will, is there really anyone better at harnessing this power than Iron Maiden? It doesn't seem like it. Bands before Maiden attempted to harness this kind of power of imagery, but they all tended to get lost amidst their own personalities and emotions: whether it was Jim Morrission attempting confusing crowd manipulation, or Led Zeppelin sending conflicting messages of power, authority and fey sensuality, rock titans pre-Maiden tended to miss the untapped market of straight-forward arena-filling adaptation-rock. Think of "Run To The Hills" as similar to Disney's "Pocahantas": it presents the European/Native American interface from both sides equally (only the Maiden song has a lot more bloodshed and a lot fewer cute animals).

If you go outside of the US/UK rock market, you will start noticing that the only visible indication that rock culture exists at all are the constant flurry of Maiden t-shirts. Like the ending of Spinal Tap, smart money for post-baby boomer rockers is on exporting to the world at large, something that Maiden has always done exceedingly well. Last week's show was introduced with a video of Maiden piloting a jet to what appeared to be Rio for a series of mammoth concerts that made the Mansfield gig look like a weeknight at the Abbey by comparison.

The set proper, pre-encores, closed with "Iron Maiden", a kind-of clunky punkish number from their debut that still, to me, sounds like their baby steps in attempting to write the kind of epic historical pieces that they would later become famous for. "Oh well, whatever" is a pretty half-assed line to begin the chorus of a signature song of a band, and the final line of "Iron maiden can't be bought/Iron maiden can't be sought" doesn't make much sense whether you are talking about the band or its eponymous "medieval" torture device*. But perhaps it only sounds out of place when played at the end of a set by a band of Maiden's calibre 30-some-odd years into their career.

* Kind of like the band Anthrax, most metal fans probably didn't know what an "iron maiden" was when they first placed Maiden at the forefront of the N.W.O.B.H.M.-- but by the first Bill and Ted's movie, the saturation of the meaning of the name was pretty much complete in metal culture. Oddly enough, some research into the history of the "iron maiden" as a medieval torture device reveals that it is actually the result of a bizarre hoax. From wikipedia here:

Historians have ascertained that Johann Philipp Siebenkees created the history of [the iron maiden] as a hoax in 1793. According to Siebenkees' colportage, it was first used on August 14, 1515, to execute a coin forger.^[2] The Nuremberg iron maiden was actually built in the late 18th century as a probable misinterpretation of a medievalSchandmantel" ("cloak of shame"), which was made of wood and tin but without spikes. Accounts of the iron maiden cannot be found from any period older than 1793, although most other medieval torture devices were extensively catalogued. "

Meaning, I suppose, that the power of the imagery was enough that the thing didn't need to actually be used in order to represent the horrors of the Dark Ages to those in the 19th century and beyond. Bogus!