After remaining largely dormant in the states for the better part of the last three and a half years, Swedish garage rock outfit The Hives have burst back onto the scene with their newest effort, The Black and White Album.
The album begins emphatically with the radio single “Tick Tick Boom,” which you may be more familiar with from its cameo in a recent Nike commercial. This song includes all the elements that you’ve come to expect from The Hives: cocky lyrics, high-hat abusive drumming and a three-chord riff that gets lodged in your brain for days. “Try it again” is another textbook Hives classic, featuring the dueling guitar riffs of Nicholaus Arson and Vigilante Carlstroem, backed by the solid bass lines laid down by bassist Dr. Matt Destruction (I couldn’t make these names up if I tried people).
The first five tracks of this album play out predictably as the fast-paced fuzzy rock anthems we’ve come to expect from The Hives, but “A Stroll Through Hive Manor Corridors” is an instrumental track in which the band exchanges their guitars for an old ’60s organ and a drum machine. Expecting The Hives to drop their guitars is blasphemous enough, but an instrumental? We’re still talking about The Hives, right? The track marks unique development in the sound of the Hives, in which their old-fashioned brand of garage rock gives way to experimentations with new sounds.
The album does have its down points, where it seems as if the growing pains associated with the new sound bubble to the surface. “Return the Favour” sounds as if it came directly from the B-side playbook of Billie Joe Armstrong. The Pharrell Williams-produced track “T.H.E.H.I.V.E.S.” is complete with the classic N.E.R.D./Neptunes sound, which quite frankly does not bode well when blended with Swedish garage rock. They revisit the eerie organ sounds of “A Stroll Through Hive Manor Corridors” on “Puppet on a String.” Although this song comes handy with lyrics, it stays true to the stripped down sound of organ and hand claps, but in the end, the track falls short and into the bland category.
In the end, we can forgive the Hives for making the occasional missed-target track because they do it with unbridled enthusiasm and, by and large, show potential in their newfound sound. The new diversification of sounds gives this album a component previous Hives efforts lacked: lasting power. Whereas Tyrannosaurus Hives and Veni Vedi Vicious came on strong but grew stale quickly, The Black and White Album actually gains credibility with extended listening.
