The Raveonettes – ‘Little Animal’

Ninety per cent of the time I use the word ‘retro’ as an insult. Now and again, however, a band manages to evoke a period of pop history (or just history) without being enslaved by the sound of the day. The most successful approach seems to be to embrace the very mythological nature of pop history, adding your own little twist of interpretation or perhaps mis-remembering, so that the picture being painted is of an era that never quite existed. This is what The Raveonettes do beautifully here: I here echoes of ‘Be My Baby’ and ‘Leader Of The Pack’, but they’re wrapped in fuzz reminiscent of the Jesus & Mary Chain. It’s not just mythic, it’s cinematic: we find our hero leaving his baby asleep in bed and heading out into the dark, deserted center of a godforsaken town to meet the Devil at a crossroads – heading out, no doubt, on a motorcycle, wearing a leather jacket with the collar turned up, hair slicked back with too much gel, and definitely no helmet.

‘Little Animal’ has mud on its shoes and a dirty mouth, and so paradoxically, what might be thought of as the ‘modern’ touches serve to remind you of the truth about the past: that people were fucking and fighting to ‘Leader Of The Pack’ – of course they were, of course. The polite sanitization, the cheerfully deadening respectability that sets in whenever rock’n’roll is sealed in amber by canonists and nostalgia, is stripped away to reveal the vitality that made it endure in the first place (see also: The Detroit Cobras, The Dirtbombs, maybe even Jonathan Richman). This is the good kind of retro.

And “My girl is a little animal, she always wants to fuck” is surely a contender for opening couplet of the year…