The Hives

The Black and White Album | A+M/Octone
By WILL SPITZ  |  November 19, 2007
2.0 2.0 Stars
hivesinside
Call me crazy, but I consider Tyrannosaurus Hives — the Hives’ 2004 follow-up to their breakthrough album, Veni Vidi Vicious — to be one of the best punk-rock albums of all time, right up there with The Ramones, The Clash, Never Mind the Bollocks. . . , and Dookie. It’s a concise, smart, funny, ferocious album recorded by five childhood chums at the height of their powers, no matter what Jimmy Iovine tells you. Well, you can file The Black and White Album under “disappointment.” With a few notable exceptions (“Square One Here I Come,” “Bigger Hole To Fill”), the band’s apparent desperation to invent the best rock riffs you’ve ever heard — the main reason VVV and T. Hives were so addictive — has been replaced by a desperation to write songs that sound good in sneaker commercials and extreme-skiing movies. Couple those relatively rote exercises in get-pumped anthem making with tepid forays into disco (the Pharrell Williams–produced “T.H.E.H.I.V.E.S.,” “Giddy Up”) and filler material — at 45 minutes, Black and White is a quarter of an hour longer than each of its predecessors — and you’ve got one bummer of a follow-up.
  Topics: CD Reviews , Entertainment, Music, Pop and Rock Music,  More more >
| More

Most Popular
Blogs
 More: Phlog  |  Music  |  Film  |  Books  |  Politics  |  Media  |  Election '08  |  Free Speech  |  All Blogs
ARTICLES BY WILL SPITZ
Share this entry with Delicious
  •   WORLDS COLLIDE  |  February 03, 2009
    A week ago Wednesday and Thursday, a curious collection of young scruffy indie kids and older scruffy MIT eggheads converged on the school's Broad Institute for two nights of free music, art, and lecture dubbed "Darkness Visible."
  •   GONE, BABY, GONE  |  January 09, 2009
    Boston bids farewell to one of its brightest spots — the row of six diverse and delectable restaurants on Peterborough Street that were consumed by a four-alarm fire early Tuesday morning.
  •   A FLAIR FOR THE DRAMA  |  January 09, 2009
    "There's not enough hype in the world for Glasvegas," old reliable hypemonger NME recently proclaimed. But that doesn't mean the magazine and the rest of the British music press aren't trying.
  •   FANS CHEER; EARTH WEEPS  |  August 19, 2008
    It’s a bummer that the four-plus hours I spent in my car feeling guilty about barfing loads of carbon into the air is most salient in my mind, because, as always, Radiohead delivered an awe-inspiring show.
  •   LAUGH AT THE END OF THE WORLD  |  August 19, 2008
    The two guys who make up Clawjob have an unnerving tendency to describe something as funny when it’s anything but.

 See all articles by: WILL SPITZ

LATEST SLIDESHOWS

All Slideshows