He's On Fire

After The Hives' success with The Black & White Album it's interesting that they took such a different approach on their newest release Lex Hives. Employing big name producers from a wide field of different genres (including Jacknife Lee and The Neptunes) produced some interesting results, which seemed to translate into big sales. The Hives' response to this was to produce the next record themselves.

“We tried to kind of go the opposite way to what we were going before,” guitarist Nicholaus Arson says. “We'd never really worked with so many different producers at one time before. When you work with new producers you get tons and tons of new ideas. You get to steal all their best ideas. It felt like we had a pretty firm idea of how we wanted to make the (Lex Hives) record. We really wanted to go back to more of the garage sound – we actually decided that even before The Black & White Album was made. We knew that was going to be our most hi-fi record ever – we knew it was gonna have all the frequencies in there. Normally we have concentrated on the mid-range, I suppose, which is what we considered to be punk.”

It's getting a bit nerdy, but it's basically the argument of lo-fi versus hi-fi. Punk and garage records are traditionally recorded with a more classic sound, with all the emphasis on the fuzzy guitars in the mid-range of your equaliser spectrum. More recent listening trends and stereo set-ups concentrate on the high end and making the bass sound fat, with subwoofers now present even on most computer set-ups.

Arson says that the process of trying to make the record sound like the garage rock record they wanted it to be involved a lot of time mixing, and taking the tracks into different environments to test out the sound. He says that this part of the process, the last part in getting the record to sound right is always done by the band anyway.

“It's a pretty full-on process, I guess,” he laughs. “We always have the last say in everything, even when we have been produced. It's pretty much always been us mixing it and stuff in the end. The producer is usually just bringing us new ideas.”

The core sound of The Hives hasn't really deviated from the master plan right throughout the course of their discography. “The first record – the Barely Legal record – was the first time we sounded like we wanted to sound, really,” he says. “We had a song on our first EP called Let Me Go… I think, if I can remember it. That one we recorded with a microphone in a toilet. It sort of resonated and I thought that was pretty punk. And that was when we discovered it was way more fun to record garage-y punk sounding stuff than it ever was trying to compress a snare to perfection or something. We were listening to modern punk as well as old punk and we always thought The Oblivians or New Bomb Turks or, you know, Little Richard or whatever always sounded better than the more modern stuff that was sort of more engineered, you know?”

While that first EP is long out of print, the song Let Me Go can be heard on YouTube and for fans of the band it's an amazing curio. Blisteringly fast, it shows their punk roots that were still bristling on the debut Barely Legal but became less prominent as they leaned more towards a classic garage sound. “The Barely Legal record was the first record where we sounded like we really wanted to,” he repeats. “After that we've been really doing the same thing, except for The Black & White Album where we really tried to fuck with The Hives' sound to a greater extent.”

The interesting thing that happened with The Black & White Album, is that despite branching out into new and possibly more commercial sounds, the hits off the album were the ones that sounded most like The Hives' classic sound. “I think the reason for that is that they don't really translate as well live,” he says of the more experimental pop sounding tracks from the album, like T.H.E.H.I.V.E.S. “Like, if you want to go and see The Hives you want to see a rock and roll show and if you want to be The Hives then you want to be a rock and roll show. It was kind of tricky playing those songs. It's hard to play like a groove-based song and make it sound as fat. Usually, if a band plays songs like that they have a huge electronic bass – like if you go and see Timbaland or someone like that – which is great. It was kind of tricky for us, it didn't translate as well live.”

There've been big gaps between the albums, but Arson says this has nothing to do with the band taking a long time to either write or record music, but is simply the side effect of how long they spend touring for each release. “If we weren't a touring band we would release way more records, I think,” he says. “The reason why we're always five or three years in between records [laughs] is just the fact that we tour so much. We toured The Black & White Album for three years and we usually would then make an album in about a year but this time around we had tons of problems around The Hives so we had to deal with tons of other shit.”

He doesn't get into details about what the tons of problems were that forced an even longer delay for Lex Hives, but says it was boring, administrative, record label stuff – just the usual then.

He does, however, express a genuine interest in returning to Australia, and in particular Brisbane. The Hives famously covered Lost & Found by Brisbane punk pioneers The Saints very early on in their career, and it's safe to say that the band have been a big influence on the very crux of their sound. Indeed, Arson cites the second album by The Saints, Eternally Yours, as one of the primary influences on the band.

Having said that, it's got nothing to do with why he is eager to return to Brisbane. “In Brisbane was the first time I ever had Moreton Bay bugs at some restaurant down by the river. It was pretty amazing. I also had crocodile for the first time, I think. Moreton Bay bugs are my favourite now, they are superb.”

Can't get a good bug in Sweden then? “Oh no no no!” He laughs. “I never saw an animal like that before. They're super.”

The Hives will be playing the following dates:

Friday 28 December - Tuesday 1 January - Falls Music Festival, Lorne VIC
Saturday 29 December - Tuesday 1 January - Falls Music Festival, Marion Bay TAS
Friday 4 January - Saturday 5 January - Southbound Festival, Sir Bovell Park, Busselton WA
Sunday 6 January - The Forum Theatre, Melbourne VIC