Friday 23/11/07 The Hives @ Hammersmith Apollo, London

For a band that's made a career out of melding the sublime with the ridiculous, tonight’s gig is a challenge of expectation. The last time this Gigwise scribe caught up with Fagersta, Sweden's finest, was on the sun kissed beaches at Benicassim festival in July. The Hives played an energetic early evening set that awakened the crowd from heat-induced slumber to claim a highlight for a weekend blessed with stellar performances from Albert Hammond Junior, Rufus Wainwright and Bright Eyes. And so a ball bustingly cold night in West London isn’t the best setting for recreating your gig of the year.

The Hives’ first major gig in London in over two years shows they've lost none of their verve in that time. For the next 90 minutes the quintet reaffirm their status as one of the finest bands to emerge from the garage rock scene in the last decade.  Watching the assembled parts of The Hives at full tilt is like seeing the parts of a well-oiled machine.  The drum skins of Chris Dangerous take a bigger pounding than Derby County on a Saturday afternoon. Almqvist’s vocal chords work harder than Michael Jackson’s defence team. The bass lines of Dr. Matt Destruction are deeper than the collected works of Sartre.

Clad in their trademark black and white uniforms, the band draw rich inspiration from their latest release, 'The Black and White Album'. Set opener 'Bigger Hole To Fill', which sets the bands marker down early with its whirlwind percussion, careers into 'The Hives Declare Guerre Nucleaire' as plastic bottles fly about the stage. Three songs in, Almqvist, a frontman no stranger to overstatement, deadpans, "do you think The Hives look thirsty my friends?" then returns to his familiar between song banter, "you pay money to get in but you pay us in applause". He then refuses to sing another note until he's had an ovation usually seen at a farewell tour.

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