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Friday, March 21, 2003

By Scott Mervis, Post-Gazette Weekend Editor

The cover of the Raveonettes debut, "Whip It On," suggests that if you like the White Stripes, you'd better have this, too.

	Official Band Site www.theraveonettes.com

And that's probably true, even though the Raveonettes don't sound anything like Jack and Meg White. Sune Rose Wagner and Sharin Foo just happen to be another boy-girl duo that rocks.

Whereas the White Stripes draw from the Zeppelin side of the new rock equation, the Raveonettes reek of the icier style of the distortion-drenched Jesus and Mary Chain.

They should know all about icy, arriving here, as they do, from Copenhagen, Denmark. The Raveonettes, in fact, were just big winners in the Danish Music Awards despite never being anything of note in their native land.

"Not big at all," Wagner says on the road with the MTV2 Advance Warning Tour. "We were never really recognized there. But that was never the intent. We always wanted to go outside of Denmark, so we didn't really want to make an effort. It's a small country and people are not really into alternative rock or anything like that."

The buzz on the Raveonettes started in England and picked up speed in the States with a review by David Fricke last July in Rolling Stone that gushed, "The Raveonettes are not only Denmark's hot gift to the New Garage. They make tight blazing pop of the top order ..."

The review helped launch a major label bidding war that Wagner, soft-spoken but building a reputation for self-confidence, was not surprised to see.

"After we made 'Whip It On,' we thought it was such a brilliant, innovative and very fresh album and we thought it would go down very well. So we knew it would happen. We didn't know it would go down so fast."

"Whip It On," newly out on Columbia, is a 21-minute rush of dirty new wave punk with the guitars (tuned to B-minor) turned way up and the vocals turned way down on the emotion meter. The record starts with a slice of screaming feedback, a Bo Diddley riff and Wagner and Foo in their typically cool Velvet drone singing, "Lipstick on my face/thunder in the sky/the shades are drawn/don't ask me why" and then they're off crashing fuzzed-out guitars and surf riffs over drum machines as they ride with cops and ghost riders on their tail.

The Raveonettes rave on through eight songs, ultimately going out with a bang in "Beat City," as Wagner sings, "Wanna die in Beat City/Run run run/Wanna hang with girls/shoot my gun/wanna catch the rays of the sun/wanna drink and drive/have some fun."

Rolling Stone championed them as part of the Next Wave and also as a garage band, but Wagner isn't eager to jump onto any scenes.

"I don't think there's a rock revolution or garage scene going on," Wagner says. "I just think people tend to like rock music again and it's a good thing. I don't think we're a garage band at all. The Hives, I think they're more of a garage band. I don't think a garage band plays with sampled drums and records on computers. That's the kind of band we are. We're more like a technology-based kind of band."

A technology-based band, that is, that's down with the two-minute wonders of early American pop like Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Everly Brothers, all of whom the 26-year-old Wagner name-drops in the interview.

"What can I say? The best songs were written back then, so we go to them for inspiration. The '40s, '50s, '60s. Simple songs, short songs, simple production, that's just what I like to hear. I started listening to it when I was 16 and it always stuck."

Wagner and Foo, who are not romantically linked, have employed a pair of unofficial Raveonettes for the tour in guitarist Manoj Ramdas and drummer Jakob Hoyer, and on recent Conan O'Brien show, they looked very much like one cohesive unit.

"The band is only for live purposes," Wagner says. "It's easier to be two people. You don't have to make that many decisions."

Like the rather odd decision of when to put the albums out. The Raveonettes plan to elaborate on the eight-song "Whip It On" soon with a full release.

"The intention was to do two mini-albums of eight songs each that would combine to make two albums," Wagner says. "When we got picked up by the record labels we didn't have time to do the other half. So we just went ahead and completed a full album that will be released later this year."

In the meantime, the Raveonettes will continue to roam the continent, baffled along the way by Americans' sense of geography.

"When I see people in this country and we say, 'We're from Denmark,' they say, 'Oh, you're from Sweden?' No, Sweden is a country. Denmark is a country. They're right next to each other. A lot of people don't know about European geography. We find that really strange."