The Raveonettes: Pe’ahi

Gorgeous West Coast noir from the retro pop rock duo.

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Danish retro-rockers Sune Rose Wagner and Sharin Foo have always worn their musical influences proudly, drawing on a reverb-heavy doom-pop lineage stretching back through The Jesus And Mary Chain to Blondie, Suicide, The Velvet Underground and Phil Spector.

Named after a famous Hawaiian surf beach, the duo’s seventh album has just been released online without warning, though deluxe physical versions are available. Pe’ahi adds little new to their established formula, but it does amplify their signature sound to new extremes of ear-bashing, melody-drenched euphoria.

With its gorgeous harp chimes and buzzsaw grunge effects, Sisters could be My Bloody Valentine soundtracking a David Lynch film, while The Rains Of May is pure West Coast sunshine-noir, Lana Del Rey with an extra jolt of amp-shredding distortion.

If we accept their obsessive retromania as heartfelt acts of recontextualisation then The Raveonettes are a living piece of Pop Art, and Pe’ahi sounds like their strongest gallery of timeless anthems so far.

Stephen Dalton
Stephen Dalton

Stephen Dalton has been writing about all things rock for more than 30 years, starting in the late Eighties at the New Musical Express (RIP) when it was still an annoyingly pompous analogue weekly paper printed on dead trees and sold in actual physical shops. For the last decade or so he has been a regular contributor to Classic Rock magazine. He has also written about music and film for Uncut, Vox, Prog, The Quietus, Electronic Sound, Rolling Stone, The Times, The London Evening Standard, Wallpaper, The Film Verdict, Sight and Sound, The Hollywood Reporter and others, including some even more disreputable publications.