Two weeks into 2003 and already the stakes have officially been raised. The Raveonettes are an ice-cool surf-guitar duo from Denmark (the boy, all Lou Reed shades and leather; the girl a backstreet blonde bombshell), all of whose spooked and dissonant boyfriend-in-a-coma fuzzbox vignettes – gorgeously Shangri-La’s-haunted and delightfully B-movie obsessed – adhere, we are told, to stripped-down Dogme principles.
What this means in practice is that first, they only ever write in the key of “glorious B flat minor” (their words) and more significantly, their doomy tales of ill-fated lovers and haunted midnight highways have the kind of utterly stark relentlessness last heard from a different, but equally atavistic, boy-girl duo from Detroit.
We can’t wait for the album.