THE VINES
The Vines are an Australian rock band formed in 1994 in Sydney. Their sound has been described as a musical hybrid of 1960’s garage rock and 1990’s alternative rock. The Vines’ success in the Australian recording industry resulted in winning an ARIA Award in 2002, ‘Breakthrough Artist – Single’, for “Get Free” and receiving five other nominations for their debut album Highly Evolved, plus two further nominations in subsequent years. In 2003, the album went platinum in Australia. The Vines have released six studio albums to date. (More from Wikipedia)
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)
