The Raveonettes: Chain Gang of Love

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

(Herald rating: * * *)

It was only a few months back when we first heard the Danish guy-gal duet's first offering, Whip It On, a mini-album which its cover promised was "recorded in glorious B-flat minor".

For this longer-player - it manages 13 songs in little over half an hour - they've shifted into the happier realms of B-major.

If they've moved up a fret, they're still singing the B-movie sleaze-blues.

It's pure schtick but it's made all the more entertaining by their sense of conviction in it and the good tunes buried among the twanging guitars, tambourines, surf-rock drums and vocals which suggest they learned English from old Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra albums. Or Jesus and Mary Chain lyric sheets.

The best songs include the rampant That Great Love Sound, Dirty Eyes (which sounds like, of all things, Paul Simon's Homeward Bound), The Love Gang (girl group-meets S&M sort of) and the sad-eyed, leather chaps-wearing country of Love Can Destroy Everything.

Not the future of rock'n'roll by any means but sort of an seedy alternative past and fun for it.

But they do risk becoming a best-before novelty, unless of course there are plans to have their way with the key of C.

Label: Columbia