Pretty in Black

1	The Heavens 3:55
2	Seductress of Bums 3:49
3	Love in a Trashcan 2:51
4	Sleepwalking 3:28
5	Uncertain Times 3:58
6	My Boyfriend's Back 2:39
7	Here Comes Mary 3:02
8	Red Tan 3:48
9	Twilight 3:35
10	Somewhere in Texas 4:27
11	You Say You Lie 2:55
12	Ode to L.A. 3:17
13	If I Was Young 2:46

Barnes & Noble

These Danes have been the cream of the conceptual crop since emerging from their home country a few years back, armed with fuzzboxes and doctrinaire notions about minimalism -- including the refusal to use more than one key per album. Well, on this disc, they've dropped the shtick (not to mention the distortion), allowing listeners to focus on the songs themselves -- and damned if the tunes aren't even better when presented au naturel! Sune Rose Wagner and Sharrin Foo still draw from the same wellsprings -- girl-group pop, the lighter side of garage-rock -- but songs like the hypnotic "Sleepwalking" and the languid, Les Paul and Mary Ford–styled "The Heavens" show a heretofore untapped maturity. The duo wear the girl-group influence on their collective sleeve with unabashed glee, covering "My Boyfriend's Back" and calling in Ronnie Spector to harmonize on the shimmery, disc-ending "Ode to L.A." The slavishness backfires, however, on "Here Comes Mary," which copies "All I Have to Do Is Dream" so slavishly, you'd think that a Xerox machine was one of Wagner's main instruments. Pretty in Black is balanced enough, however -- rockers like the Moe Tucker–powered "Red Tan" pressed up against Brill Building folk-poptones like "Uncertain Times" -- that they merit a pass on that, and a thumbs-up for keeping the three-minute hookfest alive in alterna-land. David Sprague

Rolling Stone

Pretty in Black is virtually fuzz-free, highlighting the exquisite detail in the Raveonettes' gift for pastiche. David Fricke