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LIVE: The Hives Experience Is Like Yoga
Tuesday March 04, 2008 @ 05:00 PM
By: ChartAttack.com Staff
March 4, 2008
Kool Haus
Toronto, Ontario
by Erik Missio
Bikram yoga's becoming a favourite amongst the bourgeois set. Essentially, you pay money to go into an extraordinarily hot, humid space and have someone tell you which posture and/or breathing exercise to assume. It's a sweltering experience that leaves the uninitiated a little sore, extremely exhausted and strangely at peace with the cosmos.
Going to a Hives show is pretty much the same thing, except the instructor is an insane, narcissistic Swede and you get ringing ears for the next 48 hours.
A couple of hours before The Hives' curtain call, Toronto soul/rock/dance-punk/hip-hop fusion duo The Carps kicked things off more than competently. Their sound is somewhere between Michael Jackson's Death From Above 1979 and that duet between Anthrax and Public Enemy. The band features Neil White on synths and Jahmal Tonge holding down the percussion, singing like a soul man possessed.
Between White's crowd-surfing and Tonge's exhortations to "jump up and down like it's Caribana," The Carps connected with the audience. As for their music, the initial question was: were they a more-than-able one-trick pony that's found a groove or a young band just about ready for their breakthrough close-up where the sound gets polished and they become huge? This argument became moot when the two kicked off their next song, "Compton To Scarboro" with a snippet of Bel Biv Devoe's "Poison." They rule.
While The Donnas brand of retro-inspired hair rock isn't necessarily this reviewer's thing, there's still something to be said about aggressive music that's neither angry nor angsty. Despite all four band members being under 30, The Donnas have been doing this for close to 15 years, so they're understandably pretty tight. The majority of the crowd was receptive and the band seemed genuinely thrilled to play.
With cowbell, Allison Robertson's guitar solos and kicks , and singer Brett Anderson asking things like, "Are you fucking ready to rock, Toronto?" the set was unpretentiously straight from The Donnas' collective heart. There was no posturing or hip irony.
Given The Hives live experience is infamously wicked-awesome, it was little surprise to see the all-ages faithful swarm the stage despite the band's relative absence from radio. The masses prevented the Kool Haus from living up to its (stupid) namesake. The warehouse was oppressively hot by the time the band stormed the stage in their schoolboy costumes, which were soon drenched with sweat and partially removed.
There was Vigilante Carlstroem on guitar and no-longer-moustachioed Dr. Matt Destruction on bass. Chris Dangerous, periodically launched drumsticks into the crowd with abandon while working the kit. Meanwhile, lead guitarist Nicholaus Arson, looking like a cross between Jerry Lee Lewis (ask your parents) and Peter Lorre (ask your grandparents), made faces and flossed his teeth with his guitar strings while stalking the front row. He's almost too over-the-top for the whole thing to be an act.
Then there's Howlin' Pelle Almqvist.
Much has already been written about man-child Almqvist's Jagger-esque mannerisms, his none-too-subtle lookatmeee! poses, his proclamations his band are the greatest force in rock. This is what makes him and his cohorts such a welcome change from the shoegazers, the humble and the boring.
While the band do their garage/rock/punk thing, Almqvist crawls into the crowd, commands people to jump, thrusting microphones to his heart and skips around like a kid off his Ritalin.
Of course, his usual self-glorification shtick was in full effect, ranging from the expected city shout-outs (congratulating Toronto on hosting the band five or six times in the past) to the visual demonstrations (showing how he had all of us in his hand and/or pocket), to the slightly bizarre (threatening to blow us up with rock 'n' roll, leaving us in blood, if we didn't vote for him as mayor).
The band's songs were played relatively straightforward (perhaps a bit more aggressively), with the set list veering to the newer end of the Hives' canon. This only left room for three tracks off Veni Vidi Vicious ("Main Offender," "Hate To Say I Told You So" and "Die, All Right!") and nothing from Barely Legal.
Ultimately, it didn't matter. The crowd was into everything, with virtually each song a singalong, from radio hit "Walk Idiot Walk" to live favourites "A Little More For A Little You" to newer numbers, such as "Won't Be Long."
The sound (especially the vocals) seemed off now and then, but at a concert like this, it's sometimes beside the point. Athough the band were their expectedly tight selves, the show somehow didn't feel as special as the Fagersta five's last club appearance in Toronto (not the arena stint with Maroon 5). Despite the sardine effect of the packed bodies, Kool Haus still has a cavernous feel, meaning some of the intimacy is lost.
While the crowd was supportive, it took a little while before there was sustained frenzy in between songs as well as during. Of course, each time the audience took a few moments to catch their breath and recover, Almqvist had verbal chastisements, reminding the audience this was the actual Hives concert experience, and not a Hives dress rehearsal practice run. Long before the encore closed with "Return The Favor," this had been made abundantly clear.
The extent to which Almqvist and company were being ironic is up for conjecture. Not that it matters. Hives are rock, heads will roll.
 
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