The Hives: The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons review – Swedish rockers are back, louder and faster than ever

(Fuga)
Their first album in a decade delivers a riotously good time, in a breakneck drive through the band’s mythology

‘Damn, overslept!” goes the opening line of Bogus Operandi, the first track on the Hives’ first album in a decade. A gruesome rock’n’roll tragicomedy, the single is a breakneck drive through the Swedish rockers’ mythology, plying us with the “real” reason for the 10-year wait: Randy Fitzsimmons, the fictional enigma whom they claim recruited the band and wrote all their music is – pause for effect – dead!

As character assassinations go, The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons is a riotously good time. It’s no major reinvention of the Hives’ electrified vocals, staccato guitar, and relentless pace, but it finds the band heavier, louder and faster than ever: tyres screech on Trapdoor Solution, a 64-second Looney Tunes sprint. When the band’s cartoonishly energetic second album, 2000’s Veni Vidi Vicious, secured them fame almost a decade after their formation, their star could have burned fast and bright, but 30 years of frenzied live shows have made the group formidably tight.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/HgzABTQ