BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL

Styles aren’t born so much as they are recycled. The Raveonettes’ latest album, Pretty in Black, is a throwback to the time of soda jerks, sock hops and McCarthyism—a time when America’s problems were shipped off to boarding school instead of broadcast on daytime television talk shows.
Synthesis met up with Sune Rose Wagner and Sharin Foo in a small room tucked away on the second floor of Amoeba Music on Haight Street in San Francisco. Though they were there to celebrate their album’s release with an in-store performance (prior to a show later that evening at the Great American Music Hall), the Danish duo looked as if they were in mourning—donned in all black with large dark sunglasses; two slick and fashionable rock ‘n’ roll caricatures. But to their credit, Pretty in Black has substance as well as style, and while cynics could scoff at the group for simply recycling popular sounds, talking with Wagner and Foo, their retro stance seems born more out of genuine love and reverence than anything else.

Today you’re celebrating the release of your new album by playing an in-store performance here at Amoeba. Do you get to hit a lot of record stores when you’re out on tour?
Sharin: We tend to go to a couple of record stores when we’re out on tour to visit and say “hi.” There are a few good ones here in the States, and Amoeba is definitely one of them.

Did you have a favorite record store
growing up?
Sune: Well there’s one place in Denmark called Sound Station that’s absolutely amazing.
It’s mostly vinyl, and you can pretty much find anything and everything there.

Would you consider yourselves vinyl snobs?
Sune: No [laughs]. Not at all. I used to buy vinyl before tapes and CDs, so I have a lot of vinyl, but I just recently bought a turntable. I live in New York now, and there are a lot of really good record stores there too, and you can find really good reissue stuff for really cheap, especially girl group stuff, and you can buy a record for like four bucks. Plus, it’s really cool to hear it on vinyl; so I tend to go for stuff like that—or cheesy Hawaiian records. I can go for something like that.

I was listening to Pretty in Black on the way down here, driving down to the city on long, empty country roads. I was wondering if you listen to your albums while you’re driving?
Sharin: I haven’t actually listened to it all the way through—only when we were mixing. We were recording in the mountains in Upstate New York, so sometimes driving down the mountain when we’d head into town to go to the bar or something, we’d listen to the track of the day…
Sune: Yeah, the rough mixes and stuff.
Sharin: But I haven’t actually listened to the whole album. I’m sure it’s a good experience. I know it has been said that our music seems to work very well to be taken along on a road trip. I think the fact that the music’s very cinematic—that’s the one thing we carry through all our albums—lends itself to that.

It has a real ‘50s to ‘60s pop feel. What draws you to that kind of sound?
Sune: Musical upbringing, I would say. I was listening to ‘50s and ‘60s music when I was a kid. It just sort of always stuck with me. It’s why I got into making music, so that inspiration will always be there, I’m sure.
Sharin: I think the attraction comes from, for me, that sound is the ideal sound. The songwriting is great. It’s so simple and perfect. It’s difficult to actually recreate that sound.

You got to work with Ronnie Spector of the Ronettes for a song on this album. Did she have any prior exposure to The Raveonettes?
Sune: I don’t think she’d heard of the band prior to that. We just sent this song to her, because we thought it was the perfect song for her to sing on. We wanted her to do what she does best, which is that style of singing. She just loved the song and she agreed to sing on it, and she was thrilled to do it. We were flattered because, you know, we named our band the Raveonettes after the Ronettes. She probably thinks it’s very cool that young people are still into her and are still influenced by her.

Did you write that track with her in mind?
Sune: No, not at all. It was the only track we wanted her to sing on because it was the perfect track for her to sing.

Is there anyone else you’d like to work with in the future?
Sune: I’d like to work with Mary Weiss from the Shangri-Las. That would be kind of cool. And I’m sure there are a lot of people still around from a lot of the bands we like. I just really haven’t thought about it, because these people were so amazing to me. Mo Tucker [drummer of Velvet Underground] played on the album as well. So right now, we’re sort of like “wow,” we don’t need to think about that, because we just worked with some of our heroes.

How does that feel, to work with some of your personal heroes?
Sune: It’s inspiring. It’s truly amazing. It’s what makes music fun and worthwhile, that you can actually do crazy stuff like that and get away with it.

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