Interscope Records
2004
Tyrannosaurus Hives
About This Album
It's clear that a lot care goes into the Hives' seemingly immediate, fired-up sound: this is a band, after all, that has only released three full-length albums in its 11-year lifespan. While the 2002 collection Your New Favourite Band ended up winning the group many more fans thanks to its fortuitous timing with the garage rock revival craze (and also ended up being the band's most consistent release to date), it didn't do much to disguise the fact that the Hives hadn't released a new album since 2000's Veni Vidi Vicious. Two years later, Tyrannosaurus Hives arrives, and proves that the band isn't just a fossil from the days when everyone (or critics, at least) thought that the Hives and the other bands lumped in with the rock revival were going to change the face of pop music. It may have taken the Hives awhile to follow up Veni Vidi Vicious, but they didn't waste any time: Tyrannosaurus Hives is half an hour of highly compressed, high-contrast rock that is far and away the band's best album. As usual, the band's motto seems to be "get in, rock hard, get out," and the album's opening tracks, "Abra Cadaver" and "Two-Timing Touch and Broken Bones" -- which boasts a chord sequence that sounds like a sped-up version of Paul Revere & the Raiders classic antidrug rant "Kicks" -- cut right to the chase.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 and 9)

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