The Hives Ripped the Roof Off at House of Blues Dallas

The man they call Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist shoved his hair out of his eyes and stood at the lip of the stage, surveying the screaming bodies in the semi-dark.

“Dallas! You have a problem. We are the solution. Are you ready?”

With that, the 47-year-old Almqvist and the mighty musicians behind him — Sweden’s incomparable The Hives — tore into the opening notes of “Walk, Idiot Walk,” a stomping, darkly comic salvo about the frustration and futility of modern life. The House of Blues, criminally half-full though it may have been, erupted in a spasm of joy, roaring and waving and even tossing plastic cups in the air.

The Hives specialize in just that sort of full-throttle release, and have for the better part of a quarter century now. Wednesday’s appearance was the band’s first in Dallas in four years, returning them to a venue they’d last played 17 years earlier. The Swedish quintet is on the road in support of its just-released seventh studio album, The Hives Forever Forever The Hives.

The night began with a ferocious cut from the new LP (“Enough is Enough”) and proceeded apace for the next 80 minutes or so. A Hives gig is adrenalized, amphetamine-charged euphoria — uncut rock and roll delivered with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of impact.

“We have come here tonight to do many things for you, with you, to you and against you,” Almqvist declaimed at one point.

The stage was dressed only with enormous balloons spelling out the band’s name, as its members — Almqvist, guitarists Niklas Almqvist and Mikael Karlsson, drummer Christian Grahn and bassist Johan Gustafsson — prowled the space below.

Put another way, The Hives barrel through songs with scarcely enough time to breathe, and even less time to appreciate Almqvist’s lethally charming loquacity (an audience member cried out their adoration, to which he replied: “I assume you love me; you bought the fucking tickets!”).

The band is airtight in its execution — not for nothing is its roadie dressed like a ninja; in between adjusting guitar straps and tightening drumheads, he sat in on tambourine — and conjures a pleasurable blend of Bowery bite and Scandinavian polish.

The cumulative sensation evokes being trapped in a car with a cinderblock bound to the gas pedal, accelerating ever quicker, beyond the point of all reason until there’s nothing left to do but surrender to the inevitable. (Or, as Almqvist more colorfully put it on Wednesday, “We’re gonna give you more until you can’t fucking stand up!”)

That sustained rush is one Almqvist doesn’t expect as much as relentlessly demand of the audience, exhorting their engagement again and again, Wednesday with athletic leg kicks, frantic beckoning and enthusiastic microphone gymnastics which would make Roger Daltrey blush — there were moments when it seemed as though Almqvist might launch the mic into the rafters.

To watch Almqvist’s face was to see, in real time, the theatrical merge with the genuine: The mask of Almqvist’s playfully imperial rock star persona occasionally slipped, and a wide grin took its place, indicating he was having just as much of a blast as those hollering in front of him.

Having begun at such a fever pitch would lead reasonable onlookers to assume, perhaps, The Hives left themselves with nowhere to go. Those onlookers would be sorely mistaken, as the band sustained that intensity — visibly sweating, mopping their faces with towels and gulping water throughout — from the moment the show began until it concluded.

Whether it was the audience ecstatically pogoing to the band’s immortal “Hate to Say I Told You So” — 25 years old, and with precisely none of its biting brilliance dimmed — effectively singing lead on “Bogus Operandi” or obeying Almqvist’s order to sit down near the climax of the set-ending “Tick Tick Boom,” The Hives and its audience were thrillingly bound to one another, a co-dependent, ever-escalating relationship bearing endless dividends.

Having blasted through 14 songs in less than an hour, Almqvist again looked out at the fiending crowd, his black and white suit somewhat disheveled from his exuberant labors.

“Dallas, Texas — The Hives love you and there’s nothing you can do about it!”

With that, he tossed down the mic and left the stage. (He — and the other band members — would be back shortly for the encore.) Still, the fulsome howl propelling him into the wings made Almqvist’s earlier promise feel like prophecy: “At the end, we’re all gonna be a sweating, screaming mess!”

What else is left to say, really, other than The Hives forever, forever The Hives.

See more photos from Wednesday's show: