#vigilante carlstroem

[daisies66]

The Hives article. NME, 31 July 2004. Scanned by me.

📸: Mark Eilbeck

[picspammer]

Bogus Operandi by The Hives Directed by Aube Perrie

[gninromytickcorknup]

Daniel Armbruster (Joywave) is keeping The Hives locked up in his basement in Rochester, NY claims that he's the real Randy Fitzsimmons.

[thegodofhellfire]

NULLA SALUS SINE THE HIVES

[thesearenotphotographs]

The Hives and Bad Nerves at Kings Theatre

Swedish quintet The Hives returned to New York City for their third headlining gig since 2023 for a performance at Kings Theatre in Brooklyn, NY. They were joined by their tourmates, Bad Nerves, from Essex, UK.

I covered the great show for Impose Magazine and the full gallery is now available on their website here.

[thebowerypresents]

The Hives Explode at Kings Theatre

The Hives – Kings Theatre – September 24, 2024

Of all the “the _____” bands of the early aughts rock renaissance, no one was more worthy of an added exclamation point to end their band’s name than the Hives. The Hives! Swedish purveyors of rock rizz in a time before rizz was in the lexicon, a time when the all-out Swedish takeover of American pop music was otherwise a little more subtle and buried in pop-song songwriter credits. The Hives are a band that know no subtlety.  

They’ve always been a live-show-first band, so their return to this world is a welcomed one. On Tuesday night they continued their comeback journey off the heels of their latest, The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons, their first album since 2012. But there were no cobwebs for the Hives to shake off last night. In fact, the metaphorical doors were immediately blown open with the opening guitar strums of “Bogus Operandi,” a true-to-form Hives jam that boils over by the time Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist enters the song shrieking, then boils over again and again and again. He looked to the audience and gestured for more applause like he was fanning the flames of a fire, the band donning their custom lightning-bolt-covered black-and-white suits. 

“I have been mortally wounded,” Almqvist informed Kings Theatre, letting everyone know he’d suffered an ACL injury, but in a call-and-response way with the crowd more in the style of a Pentecostal preacher. “You may have noticed I am not moving with my normal, cat-like vigor.” It’s always a little difficult to separate fact from myth with the Hives. If true, Almqvist was showing no signs of the injury. “I feel like it would do me a lot of good if you all blew on my knee,” he requested of the fans, instructing them through this twice. (Perhaps this had worked.) 

Almqvist is a man who windmills everything: windmill kicks, windmill arms, taking the microphone by the cord and windmilling that. He’s the least-still man in rock and roll, a joy to watch, to listen to banter between songs and to wander amongst the crowd. During a bathroom break I caught bartenders laughing at his line, “You have asked for a lot, but we have given you a lot.” The Hives also employs one of the world’s greatest and hardest-working stagehands, someone dressed in ninja attire as not to overshadow the band, doing his best to keep track up with the miles-long mic cord while the frontman snaked his way through the stage and crowd. 

“I hear this is a fast-paced environment where you can only make it if you do your job really quickly,” said Almqvist poking fun at New York City and introducing the fast-paced “Trap Door Solution.” For a show with ever-increasing energy, it was only appropriate to end with band introductions followed by the explosive “Tick Tick Boom.” Allow the Hives to reintroduce themselves, then explode. —Dan Rickershauser | @D4nRicks

(The Hives play Roadrunner in Boston tonight.)

Photos courtesy of Adela Loconte | www.adelaloconte.com

[the-megs]

When The Hives play in NYC for the first time in 11 years all hell breaks loose. 🤍🖤🤍🖤🤍🖤

[devicfotos]

[mitjalovse]

Scandinavian musicians do filter their own influences into their own peculiar way. The Hives, for instance, are a fine band, but let us not call them the authentic rockers. Mind you, I'm not disparaging them, they are fabulous for what they are, i.e. a postmodernist rock band, and I think they embrace that. Sure, they can rock like crazy, yet they have an edge for me over many modern revival rockers for being in on the joke. You have a hunch they are always that close to a strong laughter thanks to them being delightfully over the top. Scandinavian musicians tend to go there thanks to them rejiggering the inputs into their idiosyncratic path. However, I wouldn't call them a parody, they are more like an homage on steroids.

[spilladabalia]

The Hives - Bogus Operandi

[rockmusicassoc]

Happy Birthday to Vigilante Carlstroem, rhythm guitar phenom for The Hives, Sweden’s answer to the question, “How do we fix Rock and Roll?” Born in the rock 10/30/1978, known as Mikael to his mum. #TheHives #VigilanteCarlstroem #RockHonorRoll

[picspammer]

I only need a moment, a moment's come around You're gonna think you gone blind

[thegodofhellfire]

the hives do it again, what a show! ⚡️⚡️⚡️

[thesearenotphotographs]

The (International) Noise Conspiracy and The Hives at Knitting Factory

Full gallery available on my website here.

On Saturday, November 17, 2001, I photographed two bands from Sweden: The (International) Noise Conspiracy and The Hives in the main room of Knitting Factory. I believe this was The Hives’ first ever tour of the US and I would document two of their shows in New York City again 22 years later in support of their first new record in over a decade. T(I)NC performed at Bowery Ballroom with Rocket From the Crypt earlier in 2001 and a gallery from that show is available on my website here.

I previously discussed photographing The Hives with Jeanette D. Moses on DP Review and that interview is available on that website here.

[the-megs]

The Hives in Brooklyn!!

[upalldown]

The Hives - The Death Of Randy Fitzsimmons

Sixth studio album and first in eleven years from the Swedish garage rockers

8/13

If you’ve been angry at the existence of terrible sleaze-rock bands like Greta Van Fleet and Måneskin, the one band you have to blame is The Hives. Where once their brand of hard-rockin’ cartoonishness kept the pale imitators at bay, an 11-year absence followed their last album, Lex Hives. This opened the door for bands that might not have been trying to copy The Hives, but they certainly occupied a space that they might have dominated, had the Swedish garage-rockers been around to do that domination themselves. Where did The Hives go? It’s hard to say — maybe it’s because their brand of rock has fallen to the wayside in popularity. If you ask frontman Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist, though, they didn’t stop rockin’ because it was uncool to do so, but the other way around: “I’m just saying that The Hives don’t release a record for 10 years, [and] rock becomes completely unpopular. Coincidence? We think not.”

Maybe, though, it’s because the world has just gotten less fun to be in. Rockin’ in the free world doesn’t pack quite the punch when the world feels less “free,” and feels more “permanently dystopian.” It’s as though Almqvist and the Hives knew that the only antidote they could formulate was a stronger version of the one they began perfecting 30 years ago — which is why it was time for Randy Fitzsimmons to die, giving fresh purpose to a dormant hellbeast of a band. Longtime followers of Hives lore know that their new album, The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons, refers to the man who got the band together in the first place and wrote all of their lyrics. Following his death, a mystery spurned on by the poem that served as Fitzsimmons’ death announcement led the band to exhume his fresh grave — only to find “not a body but instead several tapes, suits, and of paper bearing the words ‘The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons’ typed up as if a title. An instruction to make more music without him, but it’s also a dick move. It’s kind of an asshole thing to do, to keep us in the dark if he’s actually alive.”

If you’re new to The Hives, reading the above paragraph may have your head spinning a little bit — what kind of band creates a character, kills him, announces that his death was actually maybe faked, and labels that character as a dickhead for doing it? — but if you’ve kept an eye on the band in any capacity since “Walk Idiot Walk” blazed into the airwaves 20 years ago, this kind of goofiness shouldn’t be surprising. Excellently-named opener “Bogus Operandi” should tell you everything you need to know about the first Hives album in 11 years: towering riffs that shred effortlessly, all culminating in Almqvist’s first line: “SHIT! Damn! I overslept!” The following 30 minutes is a wild ride that rarely lets up, and the fact that track two, “Trapdoor Solution,” is even more of a fast-paced ripper feels like the band’s way of saying, “strap the fuck in.” Every song that follows knows exactly what it wants to do, and it accomplishes it as quickly as possible — even if it results in short, killer numbers like “Rigor Mortis Radio” and “The Bomb.” None of these songs leave you wanting for more — “Trapdoor Solution” is 63 seconds long — but they’re all seriously satisfying.

Much like fellow Swedish sleaze-maestros Viagra Boys, who took the great work The Hives did and ran as far as they could with it, this is a band that is at their best when they’re making boneheaded music that comes served with a wink to the camera. You can’t make this kind of music unless you throw yourself into it, like a wrestler’s kayfabe, except the magic continues even though we know damn well that guitarist’s given name isn’t Vigilante Carlstroem. This allows them to write nihilistic stompers like “Stick Up,” in which Almqvist reckons with the brutal cruelty of life itself, and then, one song later, delivers a shockingly uplifting shout-along chorus like “In the morning, they’ll be dead and gone/ Lift your chin and soldier on/ It’s just smoke and mirrors, baby, knockin’ on your beat-up brain.” A band like Måneskin could have written a song that sounds like “Crash Into the Weekend,” but only The Hives could have made it feel somehow fresh and exciting with its huge guitars and clapping rhythms, its repetitive lyrics infecting you with every fresh listen. None of these songs are revelatory — they’re all big dumb rock songs, so dumb that “Two Kinds of Trouble” comes right out and states that its central thesis came to Almqvist when he was six years old, and it doesn’t even sound out of place — but each of them is a precision weapon that was meant to elicit the biggest reaction when they get the chance to play them in front of people.

For as much as they put into the high-concept tomfoolery within the background of the album, it’s inessential to your listening experience — all you need to know is that they invented a narrative reason for the band to roar back into life, and that the end result is a high-octane return-to-form for a band that turned their hard-rock-sleaze kayfabe into something just as glorious as what they managed to conjure up in their heyday. The world has changed considerably since Lex Hives, to the point where the mere announcement of Randy Fitzsimmons felt like a blast from the past, forcing us to reckon with a simple question: “do we even need a new Hives album?” If The Hives asked themselves this question, we should be nothing but grateful that they came to a simpler answer: “fuck yeah, we absolutely do!”