We are fully into August when the music industry typically goes on vacation and things slow down to a crawl. I’m only reviewing three albums this week — The Hives‘ first album in 11 years, Hollie Cook‘s Happy Hour in Dub, and Public Image Ltd’s End of World — but I also put a spotlight on Sweden’s Eggstone whose frontman Per Sunding will be touring the US for the first time ever in September.
It’s a busier week in Notable Releases, with Andrew reviewing Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Hurry — both of which I recommend, too — and more.
Other Basement-friendly stuff from this week: Girl Ray, who made last week’s Album of the Week, will tour the US for the first time in five years (and BV is presenting their NYC show); ’90s NYC indie rock great Lotion are getting back together for a few NY shows; The Lemonheads will celebrate Come on Feel the Lemonheads on tour this fall; masked Swedish psych band Goat are back; and John Cusack will present a screening of High Fidelity.
The vinyl reissues of Lush’s 4AD studio albums are out today.
Rest in peace Rodrigo and Robbie Robertson.
Head below for this week’s reviews…
The Hives – The Death Of Randy Fitzsimmons (FUGA)
Swedish garage punk greats are back after 11 years and little has changed. That’s a good thing!
For 30 years, Sweden’s The Hives have run on pure id; a nitro burnin’ teenage smash-up derby where every car has an anvil duck-taped to the gas pedal and a mustachioed devil behind the wheel cackling gleefully as the band’s fuel-injected garage-punk riffs soundtrack the mayhem. Make that carefully controlled mayhem: The Hives have always considered every detail, especially live — from their matching suits to Pelle Almqvist’s bravado-laden lyrics/banter to the whole band’s mastery of rock star moves — for maximum audience satisfaction. “I think before we were good, we were entertaining,” Almqvist told The New York Times recently.
For bands like The Hives who have such a distinctive and loved schtick/sound, most fans don’t want them to ever change. Which is maybe why it’s been 11 years since their last album. You can play the hits with the patented razzle dazzle (even if you’re in your 40s now), but coming up with songs to rival “Hate to Say I Told You So,” “Tick Tick Boom” and “Walk Idiot Walk” is harder. “There was a lot of time where we didn’t have songs. It was like a slow, 10-year-long panic,” Almqvist told the Times ending his quote in usual tongue-in-cheek style. “It was never an outright panic because we continued to be so immensely popular worldwide.”
The band were writing the whole time, though, and eventually showed their favorites to friend, producer and fellow Swede Patrik Berger — who cowrote Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own” and Icona Pop’s “I Love It,” among other hits — who then picked the best of the lot and helped them hone them further. That was clearly a good move as, along with the mostly Hives-free decade to reinvigorate our interest, new album The Death Of Randy Fitzsimmons is a welcome return, another charged, entertaining and hooky entry in the band’s catalog. Blazing first single “Bogus Operandi,” the stomping, glammy “Rigor Mortis Radio,” and hyperactive “Trapdoor Solution” are all superior Hives songs, and the album’s other nine cuts all fall under the “don’t fix what ain’t broke, just do it really well” MO. With the whole thing clocking in at just over 30 minutes, you’re left with more whiplash than fatigue.
While the album title — a reference to a long-running gag that the band are actually the brainchild of a puppetmaster named Randy Fitzsimmons who wrote all their songs, including these, in the early ’90s — suggests the closing of a chapter on The Hives (and offers a reason for the dry spell), the album itself refutes that entirely. “There’s no maturity or anything like that bullshit, because who the fuck wants mature rock’n’roll? That’s always where people go wrong, I feel,” Pelle said at the time of the album’s announcement. “Rock’n’roll can’t grow up, it is a perpetual teenager and this album feels exactly like that, which it’s all down to our excitement – and you can’t fake that shit.” Indeed. May The Hives never change, nor be in any hurry to get it right.
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Hollie Cook – Happy Hour in Dub (Merge)
This companion to Hollie’s 2022 fourth album is much more than just a bass-heavy remix
Dub is subgenre of reggae and a distinctive style, but there’s a lot more to making a good “dub” version of a song (or an album) than dropping out the midrange, boosting the bass and treble and adding a bunch of echo. A good producer can totally transform a recording, usually by adding as much as is taken away. For a great example of how to dub it right we have Happy Hour in Dub, which succeeds as both a funhouse mirror version of Hollie Cook’s terrific fourth studio album and a standalone work that takes the songs to new places.
“The reason and inspiration for wanting to make the dub record is because Happy Hour, in its original form, has so many intricate musical details running throughout the songs—from the backing vocal and string arrangements to some far more subtle details,” Hollie says. “And during the mixing process, hearing some of these parts on their own over the drum and bass foundation, we felt there was so much left to explore and expose in the songs and take them to outer space.”
The mirror part is more accurate than you might expect, as the album’s tracklist unfurls in reverse order, opening with Hollie’s honeyed harmonies on “Praying Dub” and closing with the title track, here retitled “Happy Dub.” (Working “dub” into song titles is requisite and welcome standard operating dub procedure for these records). In addition to highlighting some of the parts that were lower in the mix on the original, a bunch of new guests have been invited to the party, including singers/toasters Josh Skints, Jah9, and Kiko Bun, the great Dennis Bovell, and trombonist Rosie Turton whose magic playing turns “Gold Girl” into the very different “Golden Dub.” The album doesn’t skimp on the more familiar elements you want from a dub record — the sizzling trails of echo are always satisfying — but on many moments, like when Josh Skints & Jah9 take the mic on “Kush Dub,” things go from happy to blissful and ecstatic.
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Public Image Ltd – End Of World (PiL Official)
John Lydon can still be a knob, but don’t write him off; PiL’s 11th album may surprise you
John Lydon’s public persona has always been antagonistic, a wilful contrarian who follows every insightful thought with two that cross out whatever he’d just said, with a mouth big enough to fit both feet. I’ll be the first to admit it gets tiring, especially when it seems he’s spewing outrageous nonsense just to get noticed by the media (quite often in the last decade), but Lydon is more than his controversial soundbites. Anyone who’s read his wonderful 1994 memoir/oral history, ROTTEN, knows that, and Lydon won back a lot of folks with this year’s Public Image Ltd single “Hawaii,” his heartfelt, touching ode to his wife, Nora, who had been suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease for more than five years. (She died in April of this year.) That song, which also competed to be Ireland’s official entry in Eurovision 2023, closes out End of World, the 11th PiL album and a record full of contradictions as well as more than a few moments that remind you of Lydon’s rightful place in punk/post-punk/alt history. The current lineup of the band — Lydon, guitarist Lu Edmonds (The Damned, Mekons), drummer Bruce Smith (The Pop Group / Slits) and bassist Scott Firth (Spice Girls!) — is rock solid even if they’re often treading in the same dancey, dubby and Celtic water in which PiL have been floating since the late ’80s. Here, Lydon is more successful as a lyricist when he’s looking inward, facing his own mortality. “Hawaii” remains the high point, but “Walls,” “Strange” and “Down on the Clown” make the most of appealingly low-key grooves and Lydon at his most quizzical and humanistic. (“Car Chase” and “Pretty Awful,” meanwhile, could probably have fit comfortably on 1987’s Happy?) There are leaden moments, too, with Lydon shouting at kids about the “tik-toks,” overpriced higher education, and to get the hell off his lawn, but End of World is far from a disaster.
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Indie Basement Spotlight: Eggstone
Familiarize yourself with these forefathers of the Swedish indie scene before frontman Per Sunding’s first-ever tour of the US
In what was extremely surprising news last week, NYC indie rock vets The Mommyheads announced that opening on their upcoming East Coast tour would be Per Sunding of Swedish band Eggstone, marking his first-ever North American shows. Also that at these shows he would would be backed by members of Mommyheads, Apples in Stereo and The B-52’s. For this writer, that was some triple take news!
If you’ve never heard of Eggstone, don’t feel out of touch; they are obscure to all but the most diligent cardigan-wearing, import-buying, Other Music “Le Decadanse”-browsing indiepop lovers. While they never broke up, the band haven’t made an album since 1997 (and only released a couple singles since) and only one of their records got a (very small) US release. But if you’re a regular reader of Indie Basement, I feel certain you will like them.
Formed in 1986, Eggstone are considered “Godfathers of Swedish pop” (assuming ABBA are the forefathers), thanks to both their own music and having founded Malmö’s famed Tambourine and Gula Studios with pals Anders Nordgren and producer Tore Johansson, where most famously The Cardigans made their early albums it but was also home to records by Saint Etienne, Franz Ferdinand, Peter Bjorn & John, Boss Hog, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Idlewild, and more. Like The Cardigans, Eggstone made fizzy pop with one foot in ’80s UK indie and the other in ’60s/’70s jazz and cocktail lounge. All three of their albums — 1992’s In San Diego, 1994’s Sommersault and 1997’s Vive La Différence! — are a real treat. For those who still listen to CDs, Bertrand Bergalat’s Tricatel records put out Ça Chauffe En Suede! which cherry-picked the best of their three albums along with non-LP singles and more. You can pick that one up cheap on Discogs and even though its not officially on streaming someone thoughtfully made a playlist on Spotify:
Most importantly go see Per Sunding this fall if he and the Mommyheads are playing near you.
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