The Hives - 7/23/04 - Avalon, Boston, MA
Here are the steps to follow if one wants to ensure being unhappy and/or bored as a Hives show:
- Posses a love of only melodic, flowing music
- Enjoy only the noises that a violin solo performed in a perfectly acoustically shaped concert hall can produce
- Detest the electric guitar. Have a deep need for lyrics focusing on the harmful effects of war, capitalism, and forgetting to recycle soda cans
- Prefer sitting at concerts and absolutely refuse to be seen tapping a foot, toe, or finger along with music
If your musical enjoyment requirements do not include any of the above, chances are good that you would have had a damn good time at the Hives show yesterday evening.
The Hives are clearly working very hard to be a giant walking, talking, box o'coolness. For the most part, this works. The music is faboo; fun, loud, but not head splitting, always uptempo, and always full of exuberant beats and chords. The outfits are always fabulous and the LP I purchased at the show was even printed on gleaming white plastic-- nice, very nice.
With all that going in their favor, it was almost a relief to find that Pele has a tendency to overdo it with the concert banter and that the ridiculously adorable Nick Arson apparently feels the need to blow on the tips of his fingertips when ever he's not playing. I assume this is meant to convey that his fingers are "On Fiyah!" However, it's mostly confusing and frequently looks more like he's just gotten a manicure and is trying to get it to dry.
These things fill me with a mixture of relief and disappointment. One like one's rock stars to have their rock star aura firmly in place at all times and The Hives don't need to work for it nearly as hard as they're trying to. That's the endearing, yet mildly distracting, part.
I'm tempted to pass a little note forward: "Psst. Hey. You've got it, no worries." Perhaps that might help reassure them?
But all this makes them human and I suspect we enjoy getting peaks at that as much as we enjoy the glamour.
More importantly, the music is blasting on as fast and frenetic as it can be. I'm bouncing, of course, but at one point I realize that I've actually, without even noticing it, begun to jump into the air on the beat. Jump. Into the air.
This has never happened before. The Hives have induced full on jumping. My world is moderately rocked for a moment, but I manage to go with is and I find it happens more than once over the course of the evening.
The material. The material is solid. In concert, the first album's pieces stand out from them rest and have a stronger impact, but that could also be because the album is still quite new and the audience isn't that familiar with the new material.
Here's where worlds overlap oddly and I feel like I'm understanding, for a moment, what my mother feels like at the height of one of her folk show sing-a-longs. I'm in the moment, I'm into the song, the crowd is into the song, the band is into the song, we turn the bend, race towards the chorus, and suddenly en-mass we're yelling back at all the required moments. I'm yelling back, the guy to the left of me is yelling back, the three girls in front of me are yelling back, and it feels... It feels fucking fabulous. It feels like bouncing along to the music was actually just improved upon somehow. It feels... Only minimally embarrassing. And completely worth it.
Clearly, it's a night of firsts for me.
When Pele breaks to talk to us about slightly inane things, I flex my feet, shift my weight from side to side, and try to shake out my legs a little. The people behind me don't seem very into the show, but everyone else certainly seems to be. Particularly a guy in front of me that looks unnervingly like my friend Charles.
Before the last song we're told they'll keep playing if there's applause. We all engage in some "I do believe in fairies" clapping and they oblige us with one more song. Then two encores. Complete with a spectacularly glittering cloth back drop.
The music isn't going to win them a MacArthur Grant. It isn't particularly lyrical-- especially considering it's frequently difficult to even make out the words-- but it's got a crazy frantic energy and it's tons, heaps, of fun. I haven't bounced that much at a show in ages, if ever.
