With their first album in more than a decade, The Hives are delivering high-speed thrills with a “kick-ass” guitar sound
Rock ’n’ roll is an art form of myth and illusion. Of the latter you have that strange quirk of physics and biology whereby the more you turn up the volume, the faster it can feel. Of the former, well, pick your own favourite. The Hives, the biggest garage rock band in the world, and principally responsible for the revival of the garage sound at the turn of the 21st century, traffic in both. But it’s myth that sets the scene for their long-awaited studio album, The DeathOf RandyFitzsimmons.
The identity of Randy Fitzsimmons has been the subject of conjecture since the start. His legend the shadow under which The Hives sound takes form. The story goes, he writes the songs, the band get to work and breathe life into the arrangements. Only Fitzsimmons was meant to be dead, hence The Hives’ studio hiatus. Besides the occasional single, festival appearances, the band had laid low. Some outlets have named lead guitarist Nicklas Almqvist, aka Nicholaus Arson, as the real Fitzsimmons, but can anyone be so sure? He certainly doesn’t volunteer that information when he joins us over Zoom, with rhythm guitarist Mikael Karlsson, aka Vigilante Carlstroem, patched in from his vacation after a hectic summer shaking stadiums in the company of the Arctic Monkeys and filling in dates with club shows. That they answer to aliases only deepens the mystery. This album, their first since 2012’s Lex Hives, was constructed around the myth of Fitzsimmons’ apparent death, and the story The Hives are sticking to is that they read his obituary in a local paper, visited his grave, dug it up, and instead of a pile of bones they found a set of songs, an album waiting to be made, and the stage wear to perform them in.
If their story checks out, you could call The Death Of Randy Fitzsimmons the world’s first found footage rock ’n’ roll album, Bo Diddley meets The Blair Witch Project. But really, once you press play on Bogus Operandi, the lead single that opens the record, it is business as usual. Down low, it sounds in the red, studio limiters creaking, electric guitar, drums and bass pushing everything. Crank it up and it sounds faster…
“We recorded through tape, and the tape was pushed quite a bit so it gets a lot of volume, going into the red on the tape,” says Carlstroem. “It makes the guitar sound kick-ass.” One of the performance-related benefits to tape comes from its limitations the fact that it is perishable, finite, and it isn’t as cheap as it used to be. Whenever you roll it you better make it count. Carlstroem says they “pretty much always” track to tape at some point in the recording.
“I think it is way better on tape.
