That Sultry Sexy Sound (Raveonettes/Dirtbombs, Southpaw)

I have almost-seen the Dirtbombs about a half-dozen times.  There’s always been some sort of conflict, something that seemed better doing at the time.  After all, here was yet another Detroit garage band that specialized in R&B/Soul cover songs, a non-priority that led to a series of near-misses.

Boy, I had no idea what I was passing up.

The Dirtbombs don’t have especially distinctive songs – at their best, even their originals sound like untraceable covers – and lead guitarist/singer Mick Collins doesn’t employ the greatest accuracy with either of his instruments.  But the five-piece puts its priorities right up back:  There are two drummers and two bassists.  It’s a big fat fuzzy sloppy sound that will rob you of your ability to stand still.

Their show is an all-out assault on boredom.  Collins – it’s his band, at least on paper – is a commanding center and wee Asian bassist Ko Shih (who fronted a band called Ko and the Knockouts) is a captivating one-woman factory of rock star spit and strut.  But the beats rule the day.  Covers like Thin Lizzy’s “Ode to a Black Man” and Sly Stone’s “Underdog” shook their thing right along with Collins’ own songs.  

The band plowed Ramones-style from one number into another, jamming a headliner’s worth of material into an opener’s time-slot.  In fact, the crowd noticeably thinned after they left the stage.  The party was over.

The Raveonettes are a more complicated kind of get-together, and they only have themselves to blame; their self-imposed dogma can make things difficult.  It must be a Danish thing:  For the first two CDs, bandleader Sune Rose Wagner erected a whole bunch of unnecessary rules:  Each was recorded in a single key (EP Whip It On came in “glorious” B-flat minor, LP Chain Gang of Love the more upbeat B-flat major), no song was allowed to last more than three minutes, no artificial light was used.

But unlike their native country’s film movement, there was nothing jittery and contrived about their music.  Rock-steady retro tunes flailing in feedback, their first releases sounded like the soundtracks to lost self-serious futuristic early-’60s j.d. flicks.  Wagner and platinum-blonde babe-in-tow Sharin Foo each harmonize in a kind of comforting mix of urgency and cold Scandinavian detachment; though the lyrics are dripping with sex, it’s obvious that Wagner only wants to make sweet sweet love to his distortion pedal.

I liked those CDs quite a bit, though one of the reasons was that they were so short.  By keeping all the songs in the same key and giving them all the same sound, the threat of monotony loomed large; but the EP was 21 minutes, the LP a pithy 33, and they got gone while the going was still good.

When the Raveonettes first came on to the scene they got subjected to endless comparisons to the White Stripes and the Jesus and Mary Chain.  The former was lazy coincidence – Wagner and Foo aren’t a duo in the same sense that Jack and Meg are, they front an actual band, and Jack’s old school blues/garage worship doesn’t meet at the same church as Wagner’s Phil Spector obsession.  The latter was probably a little more accurate, though it seemed unfair to assume that the Dane’s Wall of Sound idolatry came second-hand.

They court JMC comparisons again on their new CD, Pretty in Black:  The sound effects and distortion have been stripped away, pushing the songs up front; similarly, the rules have fallen by the wayside, ignoring any artificial stopwatching.  Longer songs, clearer production... Sounds a little like the approach to Darklands, no?

Well, a little.  On the whole, the Raveonettes’ stuff is of a sunnier, more disposable nature.  What’s odd is that the new freedom allowed on Black has resulted in duller product.  It’s as if Wagner, no longer forced to find variations within a formula, has lost his inspiration.  Oh, they’re still singing about sex and playfully dancing with death, and still hey-la, hey-la’ing their choruses away, but instead of plowing down some lost highway (like Whip’s “Cops on Our Tail”) they’re roaming, lollygagging westward (there are three western-tinged tunes on Black).

For instance, the CD opens with the acoustic “The Heavens,” a campfire ditty ending with a electropulse heartbeat that, on a better CD, would lead into some beautiful noise; but it instead fades out behind the start-stop ‘50’s-style arpeggiogravation of “Seductress of Bums.”  A cover of the old girl group goodie “My Boyfriend’s Back” is lifeless, and unnecessary, with a farty little electronic drum beat; “Here Comes Mary” is a swayable suicide ditty fit for the prom, a snorable Everly Brothers rehash.

The album waits all the way until Track 9, “Twilight,” to wake up.  A psychotic piece of surf rock with a disco beat, it has enough energy to hold the next four tracks – the gunslingin’ “Somewhere in Texas,” the beautiful call-and-response drone of “You Say You Lie,” and the pretty Ronnie Spector-enhanced “Ode to L.A.” – together before the CD peters out on yet another unmemorable tune.

A shame, because their live show had me amped for the new album; almost everything that wound up missing from the disc – the energy, the joie de rock, the noise, glorious noise – was there at Southpaw.

There were some uncomfortable moments – when they hit “Ode to L.A.” the band awkwardly played back-up to Ronnie’s playback – but the only thing spare and weak about the ‘nettes’ set was Sune’s moustache.  I’d expected a lot of new material, figuring this and the previous days’ shows at the Mercury Lounge as warm-up shows – they’re optimistically booked into the much larger <ugh> Webster Hall in June – but there was plenty of old stuff too, and they opened and attacked that with just as much verve. 

On paper it was an odd but attractive double-bill, but the groups had more in common than one would think:  They’re both bands whose sensibilities lay firmly in the past but

best represent themselves in the moment.

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