By Matt De Marco
After the success of The Hives’ punchy “Hate to Say I Told You So” single, “Black and White Album” is their newest release and has received stellar ratings from many professional critics. However this critic can’t understand why. For the most part, the album is just a lot of noise with some lyrics thrown in. Had a keyboard and a typewriter been given to a bunch of monkeys a much better album would surely have resulted.
However, some of the “Black and White Album” was decent. “A Stroll Through Hive Manor Corridors,” an instrumental piece, is somewhat enjoyable. It has a carnival type of sound, leaving listeners with a warm, nostalgic feeling of the many carnivals past held in hometown Elk’s Club parking lots. That the entire song is performed on a 1960s organ and a drum machine is pretty impressive.
“Won’t Be Long” is by far the best song on the album, it’s lyrics resembling the times in which we live: “…you’ve become what you hate, or you hate what you’ve become.” The chorus is catchy and the music is good. Overall, this is a good song.
Unfortunately, the rest of the album cannot be talked about as positively. Most of the tracks sound the same, and if they don’t, then they just sound strange; and strange is never good in terms of music. “Well All Right” has a weird, “zoot suit riot” kind of sound. Then, about halfway through, it slows down. Why? One doesn’t know for certain. All listeners know is that this is not a good song. “Giddy Up” is just one really bad song. To put it simply, it’s a “song” filled with odd, out-of-place, space sounds with the words “Giddy Up” thrown in at random.
Putting it lightly, this is a horrible album. All the other songs that weren’t mentioned before were rock songs that all sounded alike. Whenever two or more members sang together in a part of a song, they always sang the same part; there was no vocal harmony in any part of the album, causing The Hives to sound like a bunch of drunks singing to the jukebox at a local bar. Half the time, listeners can’t even understand what they are actually singing. This might be because of their Swedish accents or due to the fact that they were singing too fast. Either way, the lyrics were about as comprehensible as a German native at a Spanish poetry reading.

2.5 out of 5 (amazon.com)