Released: 2000
It was time for mouth-to-mouth, it was time for CPR, it was time for the defibrillator. By the very end of the 20th century, the forty year old beast that was rock n’ roll had punched it’s own ticket, gone of unnatural causes, thrown one too many sevens.
Or maybe not. Because as the song goes, no-matter how low the signs of life are, the primitive soup that connects with listener’s heads will never die, the words a decades-old precognition that there will always be somebody to attach an electrode to each nipple and jolt the cadaver upright for one more time.
The Hives weren’t exactly new news if you were partial to the noise that came out of Sweden’s underground, but having met in their mid-teens by the new century they’d pissed off enough people to bring their outrageous blues-punk into your front room. In singer Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist they had a frontman for the ages, and Hate to Say I Told You So, with it’s barely controlled garage mania, was the tune they’d wrote to end all others. Once it was there, like taking a shot of pure adrenaline injected straight into the heart, the old guy plugged in his iPod, listened hard and woke up from his latest coma, ready to do it all over again.
The Voice Of Unreason 