In 2010, the Hives released a three-song covers EP to appease their fans while they worked on their next album: Tarred and Feathered featured "Civilization's Dying" by the hardcore band the Zero Boys, "Nasty Secretary" by the 1970s Brooklyn hard rock duo Joy Ryder and Avis Davis, and "Early Morning Wake Up Call", a 1985 single by Australian new wave band Flash and the Pan. Although the source material varied, and the Zero Boys song sounded slicker than the raw original, the band managed to unify the tracks with one consistent, stomping, Hives-ian aesthetic. The EP showed that maybe the band that flopped after their initial success in 2001 could deliver a solid follow-up to 2007's Black and White Album.
Instead, we get Lex Hives. Just a few tracks into their fifth long-player, it's clear that they don't achieve the same level of cohesion. Yes, they make the logical first step with "Come On!", a hyper-repetitive, fast, short pump-up album opener, featuring a canned clip of a cheering crowd. And honestly, it's tough to imagine a more depressing sound than the hollow visage of a fake crowd cheering on a group of guys repeatedly, enthusiastically singing the words "come on." Later, they try a barroom blues with "I Want More"-- musically, it drags, and lyrically, it's a lazy caricature of greed. "Without the Money" is an organ-led ballad with a riff that's way too similar to Screamin' Jay Hawkins' "I Put a Spell on You". They go for robotic new wave on "Wait a Minute" and "Go Right Ahead", both of which are gratingly repetitive. On the latter, frontman Pelle Almqvist tries and fails to pull off the line "We're gonna drink, fuck, and fight all night." (Although the negatives far outweigh the positives, there are good moments here like "Midnight Shifter", an enjoyable jukebox party song with handclaps and a saxophone that's organized like an early 1960s Atlantic R&B single.)
Maybe the album's sonic shifts can be blamed on the band's recording conditions: Over the course of two years, they recorded the album in several different studios with eight engineers. And the bigger issue than the directionless nature of the album is the way-too-clean production. Of course it's wonderful that the Hives can make a record that's clear-eyed and hi-fi, but sometimes it glistens to a fault. "Patrolling Days" leads with an aggressive punk riff, and right near the top of the song, Almqvist lets out a "woo woo!" Now normally, any "woo" that accompanies a series of power chords sounds wild, off-the-cuff, and buried beneath the guitar barrage. Here, the "woo" is placed directly at the top of the mix and sounds rehearsed, removing any spur-of-the-moment power. Most of the harmony vocals face a similar problem; they're scrubbed of any personality and, again, become a focal point due to their prominence in the mix. The end result? A rock album that sounds entirely manufactured.
Almost 20 years and five albums in, it's got to be tough to be the Hives. As a gritty garage band, they were never exactly convincing. And despite a handful of undeniable hits, the matching suits thing probably made them "too weird" to gain any traction as a radio rock band. Lex Hives might be their way of experimenting to see what sound sticks, but at this point in their career, they should already have that part figured out.
