By Samuel Rubenfeld

At its first sold-out Washington, D.C. show, held at the 700-capacity Black Cat, The Raveonettes proved how noise can be both dreamy and dangerous.

The Danish duo of Sune Rose Wagner and Sharin Foo, backed by a drummer standing behind only two tom-toms and a crash cymbal, mostly played songs from their latest record “Lust Lust Lust,” released March 12 on Vice Records in the U.S.

The band fashions themselves as a Motown version of a shoegaze band, playing off influences as disparate as Ronnie and the Ronettes and My Bloody Valentine, with a healthy dose of 50’s B-film sleaze and 60’s surf rock thrown in the mix. They pit swirling, androgynous vocals alongside squalls of guitar noise and simple drumbeats.

With Wagner, the small-ish male foil to the near goddess archetype of Foo, who is tall, statuesque and blonde, they would not look out of place on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in the early 1960’s.

“Lust” is a return to form (read: much more noise) for the band after they had released more accessible album on Columbia Records that did not sell well. “Lust” is similar to their debut “Whip It On,” but without the self-imposed requirements of recording only in the key of B-flat minor, songs having no more than three chords and no longer than three minutes in length, as the debut did.

The more abrasive songs sound as if the band is attempting to derail an oncoming train and cause a tremendous explosion, with the anti-hero (Wagner) waiting for his femme fatale (Foo) to come running off the train and jump onto his motorcycle to ride away in the night, leaving the wreckage and carnage behind them. And the band does something similar to this in its video for “Attack of the Ghost Riders,” the lead track on “Whip It On.”

The slower, dreamier songs ooze with a drug-influenced sex appeal; they would be the perfect soundtrack for a gritty nightclub, where the “greasers” beat up the “surfers,” do hard drugs and get the dream girl to come home with them.

Highlights of the nearly 90-minute set included a cover of Stereolab and the first song off of the new album, “Ally, Walk With Me,” is by far the noisiest song the band has ever recorded. The speakers thundered, violently vibrating the ribs of everyone in the crowd, who collectively stared in wonderment as Wagner tore away at his guitar strings with ferocious speed, placing his left (fretting) hand on the area where the guitar’s neck and body meet.

Openers Black Acid were a far more straightforward psych-drone-garage rock band, and they were excellent as well. They sounded like a more rocking Black Angels, a drone-rock band from Austin, Tex. Equal parts the Kinks and Velvet Underground, the band’s 40-minute set impressed the then-rapidly filling club.

The final U.S. date of their tour proved fertile ground for The Raveonettes, who firmly set their brand of drug-addled sex and danger and surf and shoegaze on a thrilled sellout crowd at the Black Cat.

The Raveonettes mixed noise, shoegaze, indie rock and pieces of everything in between as they played their last show on the 29th at the Black Cat in Washington, D.C. (confessions123.com)