The Hives
w/ the (International) Noise Conspiracy, Rival Schools, One Time Angels
Graceland, Fri Dec 7, $10.
My heart thrashes with love for the Hives. My passion has little to do with the physical stuff, although I dig their aristo-punk style, and frontman Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist is a wild little smart-ass. No, my passion has everything to do with their brash, overstimulated, triple-speed garage punk. The Hives’ music moves volatile humor, with aftershocks of distorted vocals, high-pitched squeals, and amphetamized rock and roll. They threaten to lose their heads, spike the Machine, and bomb the world, but these guys are more interested in punk rock and blowing up their mock egos than in planting any real political dynamite.
I first stumbled onto the Hives about a year ago, on a trip to Europe bankrolled by my local unemployment agency and a skimpy dot-com severance check. The band took the stage at a crowded Paris nightclub after a perfectly sloppy French garage band called the Dare Dare Devils. Once the Hives hit the stage, Almqvist announced in his heavily accented English, “We are the Hives, we are from Sweden, and we are your new favorite band.” He made good on his promise, breaking his voice on all the high notes and shaking all over the stage. The Hives were bratty without getting campy. They were poppy without losing their grip on punk. And they were fast without scattering all the hooks.
By the end of their set I was overheating with excitement, buying every CD, single, and T-shirt I could find (I highly recommend Veni Vidi Vicious as the absolute best of the Hives so far, although Barely Legal‘s good in a young, raw kind of way). Finally, after the ennui of too much calculated Parisian electronica, here was a band that abandoned humility, trashed self-control, and fucked the brains out of rock and roll.
Since that rock-altering one-night stand in Paris, I’ve done everything short of buying prayer candles to get the Hives to play on an American stage. While they’ve been nominated for a Swedish Grammy and mauled by the adoring British press, only recently did the Hives finally arrive for their first U.S. tour, and they’re here in relative obscurity. The band is still a precious secret for those in the know, and they harbor a few enigmas of their own. Similar to the whole White Stripes debate (where Meg and Jack White played at being brother and sister when they’re reportedly ex-husband and wife), the Hives work shrouded in rumors about one Randy Fitzsimmons, a man the band claims created the Hives when the members first hit puberty. If the stories are true, Fitzsimmons is the Malcolm McLaren of Swedish punk, forming the sound and the image for the band, and communicating via mail with ideas for new material.
Mr. Fitzsimmons has yet to show his face, and Almqvist is remarkably vague about the man and the origins of the band. “We didn’t really form ourselves. We had a lot of help,” he says, via cell phone from the road. “This guy Randy Fitzsimmons put the band together and he thought it would be a good idea for us to play together back when we were really small, about eight years ago. It’s pretty unclear when we first formed the band, but it’s always been the same five of us.”
When asked about Mr. F’s background, Almqvist deflects the answer in his low, Speak & Spell English delivery. “It’s sort of top secret. I can’t tell you that much about it. He prefers to be anonymous, so we can only disclose his name at this point.” Almqvist can’t even tell me the guy’s nationality, just that he’s like the “sixth member of the band, who doesn’t like to go onstage.”
The last thing I want to believe is that my new favorite Swedes are some prefab act, coming from the punk end of the assembly line churning out so many ABBA and Britney songs for the Wal-Marts of the world. The Hives explode with hyper-hyperactive energy, which usually only comes from one of three things: sexual frustration, good drugs, or an obsession with the Sonics and old-school punk. So I’m betting the Hives make up stories about this mystery Svengali to mess with their fans. At least that’s what I hope, because these boys fucking rock.