Album Review

The Hives – The Black and White Album

• 29th Nov 2007

Thanks to Pharrell Williams, The Hives optimise the rock’n’roll sound on their new record, ‘The Black and White Album’.

Combining The Beatles 1970 double album and Metallica’s most commercially successful album until now only gave us DJ Dangermouse’s take on The Beatles and Jay-Z’s Rick Rubin produced ‘rock’ album, which had nothing to do with Metallica.

That was all pretty self-explanatory until The Hives came along with this colour coded rock’n’roll record all the way from Sweden.

So enough on the wholly pointless title which represents The Hives choice of suit rather than an attempt to mix colours and genres together because the record itself is perfectly polished production of the most basic rock and roll techniques and the best thing about it is how many of these traditional techniques The Hives have in their artillery.

A vast arsenal of loud, screamy and shouty, they can do subtle and whispering as well. There is an instrumental and a three chord punk song next to each other. It’s that kind of cultural harmony and diversity the band can be proud of on this record.

The B’n’W Album is an album of everything, in so much that everything rocks on here, right up until closing [UK bonus] track and album highlight: Fall is just something grown ups invented.

A triumphant release of a delightful album. If only so many people hadn’t already made up their minds about this band.