Tyrannosaurus Hives

In an early scene in Alan Parker’s The Commitments, Jimmy Rabbite and Outspan are attempting to settle on a name for their cherished blues/R’n’B collective. “It has to be ‘The’ something,” states Jimmy. “All the great bands begin with ‘The’”. Having considered his manager’s suggestion, Outspan (played by the lead singer of The Frames, lest we forget), hits on the perfect solution: “We should call ourselves The Fuckin’ Eejits!”
With the exceptions of The White Stripes, The Strokes, The Soledad Brothers and one or two others, this would be a more than apposite moniker for the majority of the bands who have rode into town on the NME-sponsored ‘New Rock Revolution’ bandwagon over the past three years. On balance, though, The Hives probably just about deserve to be given the benefit of the doubt.
Whilst their breakthrough album, Your New Favourite Band (if nothing else, you had to admire the cheek of that title), was certainly no masterpiece, it did feature a couple of killer singles in ‘Main Offender’ and ‘Hate To Say I Told You So’, in addition to which the band displayed a refreshing degree of cockiness and an unapologetic devotion to the increasingly lost art of showmanship.
Visually, they also had the goods; a bassist who proved that girth need be no obstacle to rock stardom (inspiring a legion of rotund rock fanatics in the same way that Alex Higgins provided a rallying point for a generation of pissed-up snooker hall patrons), whilst Howlin’ Pete Almqvist strutted and preened for Sweden.
Musically, one hoped that Tyrannosaurus Hives would see the band vary the template a little, but, regrettably, the group seem to have spent the last couple of years enjoying the perks of celebrity rather than putting in the required sweat-work in the studio.
The opening numbers ‘Abra Cadaver’ and ‘Two Timing Touch And Broken Bones’ possess energy and vigour to spare, but from a structural standpoint, they bear all the hallmarks of a band keen to get proceedings over with as quickly as possible before closing time. ‘See Through Head’, ‘B Is For Brutus’ and ‘Missing ‘Link’, meanwhile, feel similarly rushed, and also suffer from the same dearth of melodic dynamism.
In fairness, things do improve somewhat when the band stretch their wings a little and depart from the tried and trusted formula of strut ‘n’ sneer. ‘Walk Idiot Walk’ features a turbo bass-line and barbed guitar work reminiscent of Iggy Pop; ‘No Pun Intended’ has the powerful thud of The Damned at their most incendiary; whilst ‘A Little More For You’ alternates between Strokes-style bouncing guitar-pop and corrosive punk riffing with considerable panache.
Nonetheless, even at these junctures, there remains one glaring weak link in the mix: Alqmvist’s voice. Although the singer’s stentorian bark is tolerable, even exhilarating, in small doses, over the course of an album his resolutely one-dimensional delivery palls more than a little; at his worst, he sounds like Taz The Tazmanian devil trying to impersonate David Johannsen.
Overall, Tyrannosaurus Hives is a fairly perfunctory attempt to merge a few different new-wave guitar styles, with ‘70s punk as the support scaffolding. But, like many of their contemporaries (a worrying amount of whom have the definite article in their band-names), The Hives don’t seem to have the willingness to progress and experiment that mark out the truly great bands. Indeed, with the skinny ties and brace of novelty hit singles, there’s an alarming sense that The Hives are simply destined to be to the noughties what The Knack were to the 80s.
As punk godfather Captain Sensible put it in ‘Thrill Kill’, ‘We’re just having some fun messing round with a gun. Don’t get excited.”