The Hives @ The Avalon, 11/7/07

The Hives played at the Avalon tonight in Hollywood, supporting their more-of-the-same-but-good new album, The Black and White Album . These Swedes rock hard (as most of them do) and were extremely tight and poppy as expected. Everyone in that band must have been hyped up on a Costco crate of Pixie Stix or something because those guys are nuts!

The Hives are known for being completely wild, and saying very ridiculous, nonsensical and seemingly cocky and arrogant things between songs. At one point, frontman Howlin' Pelle Almqvist wanted everyone to applaud louder and louder and he wasn't satisfied so he said "don't make me come down there and set the rest of the city on fire Los Angeles!" What a low blow! He's referring to all the fires in Malibu. The crowd "oooed" and "booed", then the singer was silent for a minute, and then said "ah fuck you guys!" and they kept rocking. Hahahaha, crazy Swede.

Highlight of the show for sure: in the middle of the song "You Dress Up For Armageddon", right after the line "who is the man with the microphone? Today he is here but tomorrow he is gone" the entire band froze exactly like wax figures for about 30 seconds. Silence. Then the crowd applauded louder and louder, until Pelle Almqvist broke the stillness with a smile, and then two seconds later the band continued with "but I disagree!!!" Awesome. And lucky you, bathtubexplosion blog reader! I have a clip of this below!



Only real letdown of the night was, I didn't know it was a fucking KROQ show! Yes, KROQ! The same idiots who fucked up radio with all the same shitty bands. Seen the "I Am KROQ" billboards? Incubus, Chili Peppers, Foo Fighters...get over them already, FUCK! These shows are always filled with a bunch of kids and idiots. There was a loud fat Mexican chick in front of me the whole show who kept crashing into people, and a bunch of high school kids who smuggled in beer cans and were obviously drunk for the first or second time because they acted like fucking fools and talked too loud in my face. I wanted to smash heads. But that's the price you pay to get up close and take sweet ass pictures!