Dec 14

The Hives

THE HIVES

 
The Hives  are a Swedish rock band from Fagersta that first garnered attention in the early 2000’s as a prominent group of the garage rock revival.  Their mainstream success came with the release of the album Veni Vidi Vicious, featuring their most well-known anthem “Hate to Say I Told You So”.  The Hives are known for performing in ever-changing, matching black-and-white suits.  The band puts emphasis on their energetic live shows and have been acclaimed by music critics as one of the best live rock bands in current music.  (More from Wikipedia)
 
 
Of course, the other side of the complaint I mentioned above is that, sure enough, “they do still make ’em like they used to” from time to time.  I heard an ad on VH1 the other day that used a killer track by the Black Keys as the background music.  The success of this band – they’ve been going strong for more than a full decade now – proves that the Garage Rock Revival of the early 2000’s from bands like the White Stripes, the Hives, the Killers, Eagles of Death Metal, and Queens of the Stone Age still has some life in it.  
 
(January 2012)
 
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Back when MTV and VH1 used to play music videos, and when I wasn’t watching anything else, I would often have one of those channels on, with my videocassette recorder at the ready, in case a video came on of a song that I really liked.  Particularly when there was a song in “heavy rotation” that I really wanted, I would often have the VCR already cued up, on “hold”, so that I would miss as little of the video as possible.  Sometimes I would get lucky, and I would already be recording a song when another one came on that I wanted as well. 
 
That happened one time with “No One Knows” by Queens of the Stone Age.  The time was back in the Garage Rock Revival period of the early 2000’s, when the White Stripes, the Hives, the Strokes, and several other great retro bands were really getting established.  I hadn’t heard the song before, but the beat sounded good, so I left the recorder running.  That song got to be a real favorite of mine, and I was particularly thrilled when I later recognized Dave Grohl – former drummer for Nirvana and front man for Foo Fighters – on drums in the video (that’s a video cap from the “No One Knows” music video above). 
 
(December 2012)
 
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Two other bands came along at about the same time with songs on MTV that I really liked; they even had similar names:  the Vines and the Hives.  At the annual MTV Music Video Awards telecast in 2002, the two bands had back-to-back performances that were simply wonderful.  As it turned out, it was just the one song on the Vines album, Highly Evolved that really had that garage-rock style, but the Hives kept releasing one great album after another.  Also, their live shows have been rated by Spin magazine as the 8th greatest ever.  The Black and White Album above is the only one by the Hives that I actually own, but I am sure looking hard for others. 
 
I would view The Sound of San Francisco, a collection from 2003 of songs from brand new bands in the San Francisco Bay Area, as documenting one of the first wave of bands that were directly influenced by the Garage Rock Revival – it was released in the year after the White Stripes’ “Fell in Love with a Girl” single and the Queens of the Stone Age’s Songs for the Deaf album were released, as well as the mini-battle of the bands between the Hives and the Vines on the MTV Music Video Awards. 
 
(January 2013)
 
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I caught the hit by the Nails, “88 Lines About 44 Girls” on YouTube, and it really is a hoot; but their follow-up “list” song on Dangerous Dreams, “Things You Left Behind” is every bit as good.  At one point, they even break down the “fourth wall”:  “A dozen contraceptive sponges / Anyone here got a rhyme for sponges?”.  Other highlights from the album are the opening song, “Dig Myself a Hole”; and on “Voices”, they come up with a religious-themed song (I seem to have a lot of those in recent Notes) – Moses (among others) insists that “He talked to me!”.  The Nails remind me of the Hives in their ability to generate infectious grooves in an offbeat way. 

 

(March 2013)

 

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On May 29, 2011, at a Rhino Records pop-up store in San Diego, the Crawdaddys showed up unexpectedly with a reunion concert that included former members Ron Silva, Peter Miesner, and Keith Fisher.  After noting the surprise at the Crawdaddys being there at all, the L.A. Weekly report on the concert continued:  “Another surprise was how hot and vital the band sounded, even after being dormant for so many years.  You could certainly hear where latter-day ’60s revivalists like the Hives got their ideas, as singer-guitarist Ron Silva snarled his way through a set of Crawdaddys originals and vintage covers of primal rock classics like ‘Oh Baby Doll’, ‘Slow Down’ and ‘Let the Good Times Roll’.  The group were at their best on Rolling Stones-style blues rockers like ‘Bald Headed Woman’, but they also deftly pulled off poppier tunes like the Knickerbockers’ Beatles sound-alike ‘Lies’ and a yearning, affecting version of the Velvet Underground’s bittersweet ‘There She Goes [Again]’.”  

 

(January 2015/2)

 

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Among the rock bands that have arisen since the Garage Rock Revival began in the early 2000’s, the Black Keys has attained a prominence in the American consciousness that Queens of the Stone Age, the Hives, the Strokes, and even the White Stripes never quite managed. As an example, I have noticed the band mentioned in our local paper twice in the past two or three months. Suzy Shaw of Bomp! Records told me that she was eating lunch in Los Angeles once and overheard several suit-clad businessmen talking about the Black Keys a few tables over. 
(June 2017)
Last edited: March 22, 2021