Hives - Tyrannosaurus Hives CDs • Vinyl Records • LPs • Music Albums

instant classic.

Now the Hives face the same question as their garage comrades: What do you do for an encore? Well, if you're the Strokes, you could streamline your original rhythmic concept on a sharp new bunch of songs and prove yourselves as groove masters. If you're the White Stripes, you could stretch out stylistically, indulge all your sickest pretensions and prove you can get away with anything except letting the drummer sing. You could also get drastically better (the Von Bondies), have your lead singer lose his mind on drugs (the Libertines), try to sell your fans weak outtakes from your first album (the Vines) or attempt a song titled "Hong Kong Fury" (the Datsuns). Or you could just plain suck as bad as any of the new-metal dinosaurs you were supposed to replace (Jet).

But the Hives have a smart strategy: They strip it down beyond minimalism, refining their sound to an elemental buzz and blast with a scientific sense of precision. Tyrannosaurus Hives is so tight and efficient, it makes Veni Vidi Vicious sound almost like it came from a jam band. It adds Devo-like keyboards to the same mechanically engineered herky-jerk riff, set on "stun," for a filler-free half-hour of fast thrills -- thirty minutes and five seconds, actually. Almqvist has a violent relationship with the English language, screaming over the top as high-speed riffs such as "Abra Cadaver," "Walk Idiot Walk," "Antidote" and "See Through Head" go slamming into one another like an ugly day at the go-kart track.

The only stylistic departure is a great one -- the near-ballad "Diabolic Scheme," a brazenly synthed-up rip of James Brown's "It's a Man's Man's Man's World." Almqvist lets his tortured wail fly ("I had time well spent/I got your mind well bent") over a fake string section and a guitar solo that eerily replicates the sound of the late Robert Quine. Elsewhere, the Hives are more at home just revving the tempo and letting the staccato guitars beat each other senseless, as in the album's finest moment, "B Is for Brutus," which takes less than three minutes to play and might have even taken longer to write. The Hives may be hard-partying rock animals, but from the sound of Tyrannosaurus Hives, they're also a tribute to the precision and powe

The Hives make it ridiculously hard not to fall in love with them. Their amplified garage punk is so infectious that they make everyone else sound like posers. Their pure, snarling pop gets a more frenetic makeover here, with the amps set to burst. Singer Howlin' Pelle Almqvist sounds possessed throughout.