With rock's current favourite flavour being the three-chord thrashing of the Strokes and White Stripes, the Hives couldn't have picked a better moment to offer their Swedish-accented version. If, that is, they really are from the rock'n'roll backwater of Fagersta, Sweden, as Poptones Records claims; they sound absolutely New York, and only their ludicrous nicknames - Howlin' Pelle Almqvist, Vigilante Carlstroem and so on - reveal them as Scandinavian pastiche-merchants. Yet they're so fluent in the language of punchy riffs that by the end of their 40-minute set the words "Abba" and "Cardigans" are banished from the mind.
Originally booked into a smaller venue, the show was moved to the Astoria when it sold out. There are enough people shoving each other around the balconies tonight almost to justify the title of their first UK album, Your New Favourite Band. Its simultaneous arrogance and self-deprecation also sums up the Hives themselves, particularly singer Almqvist, whose antics are up there with those of Iggy Pop, Michael Hutchence and Scooby Doo's Shaggy.
"Howlin' " aptly describes his way of tackling a tune. Shaking his floppy mop, he gets his teeth into every barbed burst of noise and shouts for exactly three minutes in a parodic American accent. The occasional lyric is decipherable - sounding like the perennial adolescent outsider, he wheezes, "You laugh and call me idiot" on the anthemic Aka I-D-I-O-T - but the words don't really matter. Howlin' Pelle's mission is to send up the iconic status of rock frontmen, although it's clear, as he whirls and thrashes, that he wouldn't mind a bit of that status himself.
It's hard to tell whether this group is for real. You can't fake musical tightness, and the backing Hives, led by powerhouse guitarist Carlstroem, are undeniably sharp. Main Offender and Hate To Say I Told You So roar along like runaway punk trains, and Blues Brothers is as bluesy as you could hope for. On the other hand, Almqvist brings a comic element to the proceedings with endless observations along the lines of: "One of our most prominent skills is annoying people, but we failed, because everyone loves us!"
Smug? Retro? Guilty on both counts, but they're so entertaining that the Hives could spread like a rash.
