Raveonettes

Artist: The Raveonettes
Album: Raven in the Grave
Worth buying: Yes
You will be interested in this album if you are a fan of: Dark 80’s music, and music from the films of David Lynch.

Tell me more: Last year The Raveonettes “In and Out of Control” Made my top 10 list of the year. The album was mostly a dichotomy of fun pop music with very dark lyrics. And there was something both surprising and appealing about it.

This year the band has released “Raven in the Grave”. Gone is the fun pop sound of the last album. The music is dark and the lyrics are dark…..but it’s a different kind of dark. The lyrics to In and Out of Control dealt with a real world kind of darkness. The lyrics to Raven in the Grave have another worldly darkness to them.

The music is dark too but in an 80’s kind of way.

In fact, many of the songs on this album feel like they came from the soundtrack to an unknown David Lynch film during the Twin Peaks era (yeah, I know, Twin Peaks premiered in 1990, but we didn’t all stop wearing bell bottoms and start dancing to disco in 1970).

If you are a fan of dark 80’s music or the music of Angelo Badalamenti, I think you will enjoy this album. I did……but (and this is the weird part) I don’t enjoy this album in my car.

I do a lot of listening in the car. Maybe it’s just the way the album was mixed, but this album became unenjoyable in my car. Listening to it at home though it was fine…..I can’t explain this, and I have never encountered this with an album before….Wierd eh?

TJR  2011

What about the packaging? The album comes in a digipak with a nicely designed lyrics book

Get Raven the Grave Here

 

Lip Synching at the Beijing Olympics

Well it would appear that the Chinese didn't think that the girl who sang at the opening ceremonies was cute enough

So they did what our music industry did back in the 80's. They had her sing behind the wings while someone better looking lip synched in front of the camera's.

ttp://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/news?slug=ap-china-lip-synchedsong&prov=ap&type=lgns

After the Mili Vanilli lip synching scandal of the 80's broke a number of acts had to come clean about it. C&C music factory had to admit that it was not the hot looking girl singing in the music videos that was actually belting out Everybody Dance Now but was instead one of the groups back up singers.  Towards the end of the 80's/early 90's we had music videos where the credits read:

Song performed by:(Fill in the name of the person actually singing the song)

Song  visualized by (Fill in the name of the person lip synching)

It was certainly one of the lowest points in popular music

Of course what's really bad is that the Chinese government is defending this.