You can like the new album from The Hives. Or not.
Live4ever first met Swedish noisemakers The Hives during a festival performance at the turn of the century; with typical hubris frontman Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist introduced Die, Alright! as, ‘Our next single, so buy it – or don’t, it doesn’t matter, because I’m independently wealthy’.
Suited and booted, the quintet’s primitive rock n’ roll and residual self-image as rock iconoclasts has rarely wavered since. In the lead up to the release of their first album in over a decade, since 2012’s Lex Hives, Almqvist was keen to reiterate the band’s vision: “We don’t do ‘pretty good’. The world has enough OK rock music. We’re only here to play fantastic rock music.”
Their newest work however comes with a slightly tortuous and almost certainly fictional backstory, of the character the title refers to and his mysterious supposed passing from this world.
The rest you’ll need to research, but it’s safe to say that who or whatever Randy Fitzsimmons was, he’s been doing some heavy lifting from beyond the grave here along with producer Patrik Berger (Lana Del Rey, Robyn).
When a record arrives with such a grandiose narrative it’s hard not to conclude that the music itself might not be capable of holding the listener’s focus, and whilst many other bands might’ve been tempted to diversify a little, Fitzsimmons’ legacy is one of not fixing anything the Swedes felt wasn’t broken.
This means the patented Ramones n’ Stones approach remains almost the limit of their horizons: opener Bogus Operandi starts with a wail of feedback and some power chords, but the teeth of it is still a balls of the wall riff, call-and-response vox and a chorus that sounds especially good when heard from under a neon beer light.
It’s reasonable then to not expect the unexpected, and there’s still a chunk of The Death Of… which is solidly low-risk, if hi-octane, retreads of familiar ground, such as Crash Into The Weekend and Smoke & Mirrors.
Occasionally the tempo rears up to almost hardcore pace (Trapdoor Solution and closer Step Out Of The Way), de-layering what’s already pretty unsophisticated music, and the playground scats of The Bomb create the impression of a track which – make no mistake – you are either going to play on a loop or never listen to again.
Perhaps that’s the point: The Hives have never wanted a relationship, only for you to listen. Many in fact not convinced with their bombast profess a love-hate relationship with them, whereby they believe the group love themselves and they hate them for it.
Life – or in this case, death – is never that simple, however. Reluctantly or otherwise, if sought, some nuance is applied in for example Stick Up’s hammy brass shuffle, the peacocking handclaps of Rigor Mortis Radio and What Did I Ever Do To You?, where delicate synth lines eventually meet cabaret horns.
Throw in the odd lyrical zinger or two (‘This guy Maslow he had a ladder/That you use to get up there/So what is the view like from up there?/Well you can’t see the bottom of the stairs’) and despite their down-dumbing endeavors Almqvist’s well-tailored gang sometimes prove they know their way around more than one kind of tune.
The story about being independently wealthy was probably bunk as well, but not the mono-dimensional ego-fest even they would have you believe, The Death Of Randy Fitzsimmons is an album that with no little irony finds The Hives still in the rudest of health.
