The Hives - The Black And White Album (Polydor)
4/5
By: Alex Lee Thomson
Welcome back to the world of The Hives. Did you miss it? Don't worry, everything's where you left it, only the years have taken their toll on the ambience and though the guitars, that streaming vocal, and of course the very unconventional nature of the band are left in place, they've all developed into something strange and new, like a virus in a test tube abandoned in a lab for several years. Prepare to be musically beaten and left for dead by The Hives, for this is 'The Black And White Album', and it is raw, unnervingly so.
The album opens with 'Tick Tick Boom' and we're lucky it does, as it's the most unadventurous track on this hugely breakthrough album, and it's all progression from there on in. You wouldn't guess that the bands first LP, 'Barely Legal' came out ten years ago as pretty soon into this ramshackle-by-design, genius-by-production long player you're in the thick of 'You Got It All', a track so simple in melody, but so charged with ballistic egression, it could have played just after 'AKA I.D.I.O.T.' and done just fine. It's funny how on one hand this is the most well produced (with a range of producers involved) album of the bands career, while on the other it returns to the simple rolling melodies of their former days with tracks such as 'It Wont Be Long' that stab harmonies relentlessly into your ear-canal as if to prove that they can still do that ballsy brash sound but they, like you should do, have moved on just the necessary amount.
Our hero, the predictably unstoppable Howlin' Pelle Almqvist, broadens his voice on this album. Along with the rest of his band of unlikely supermen, he ventures towards new areas of the 'Hives sound' that they've never before stumbled into. The Pharrell Williams doctored 'T.H.E.H.I.V.E.S' couldn't sound less like them if it tried, with a getto-70's funk boogie feel over the Who-esque rambunctious thrash that they're normally associated with, but with a slight eccentric twist and thud of the anomalous electric guitar you remember that it all goes together in the world of The Hives.
If you think you know this band, even after three pretty evenly spaced albums, you don't. This one will drag you back to the dance floor over and over again as each song charges the temper and turns your initial diagnosis of 'The Black And White Album' on its head. Even as the trip-hop 'T.H.E.H.I.V.E.S' is closing you're put back to the Scando-rock, clean lines of 'Return The Favour' and electronic fulsomeness of the outlandish 'Giddy Up' that leans more towards Talking Heads than The Clash.
In a way this is the bands last shot at a mainstream crossover. They've already delivered some of the best rock 'n' roll songs you're likely to hear in your life, see 'Main Offender' and 'Hate To Say I Told You So' for that, but on this LP they're ramming a bit more out of what we can take from a guitar band and while this doesn't have anything as memorable as those two abovementioned tracks, this will certainly be the most talked about album going forward for its sheer trialling. There is that honest punk minimalism here, but also moments of complete experimentation which will either make or break the band. Fans will take some time to love this one, we can just tell. It's so undeniably different and you can't escape that fact. If you're expecting the same sound re-packaged with different words, sorry, this will disappoint. But there's so much going for it once it grows, settles and develops on your pallet, it could be your favourite album of theirs and maybe even one of your best loved rock albums in general, but it's going to take effort.
The diversity may strike a sharp line between post and pre this album, but any fan of the band will by now be in on their style of humour, that sense of anything goes as long as it's completely rock and roll, and even during 'Puppet On A String', that mentality is in the driving seat. This goes in a whole manner of curious directions, like a circus sunk across a Tim Burton canvas, but at the centre of each tune is the pummelling strength of The Hives. Still. It might not sound like The Hives you know, but it's them, and put in context with the rest of their material, this is undeniably their best album to date. We say "to date" as after this their future is almost certainly going to be spent sound tracking the shaking of our pelvises and turning of our heels on many a dance floor for years to come. If you're scared to buy this, well, you should be! You've never heard anything like it, but doesn't that thought just get you randy?
Stream three tracks from 'The Black And White Album' HERE.
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