Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Seriously LOUD!, September 16, 2002
When I first heard of The Hives and got glimpse of them my curiosity was peaked and I listened to Veni Vidi Vicious. I thought it was a great album and listen to it frequently. BUT, after listening to Barely Legal I was completely blown away! These guys are the real deal. If you thought true hardcore/punk was dead, rejoice! Apparently it is alive and well in Sweden. This album captures the power and energy that made bands like the Misfits, Minor Threat, and others so great. The songs are short, loud, frenetic, and compactly beautiful. Of course radio and TV will never play this music. Bands of the new punk (yeah right!) scene could only dream of playing like this. Hopefully commercial success will not soften the Hives. They may help revive the true punk/hardcore scene.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
When they were raw, April 9, 2004
By A Customer
Before the perfectly crafted Veni Vidi Vicious, there was this. The sound is a lot the same, but the music is much more punk, much faster and harder, one great one- or two-minute song running into another, all at the same frenetic pace. The Ramones would be proud.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Raw and "Legal", December 14, 2004
The Hives are one of the hottest bands around today, mingling Stooges-type punk with acid-penned songwriting. "Barely Legal" is a faster, punkier, nastier, harder album that came before their breakout album "Veni Vidi Vicious." It's immensely good, but it does suffer from an overabundance of soundalike songs.
It opens with a spoken intro to the band, which immediately leaps into a boiling rock song, which is only broken by Howlin Pelle occasionally saying "Well well well!", as if surprised by the band's sound. After that comes the spelling-bee rage of "A.K.A. I-D-I-O-T," roaring "Automatic Schmuck," and the well-named "Uptempo Venomous Poison,"
The Hives are not quite the saviors of rock'n'roll -- their music leans on classic punk a bit too much for that. But they might be one day. Where most rock is polished and passionless, the Hives are full of emotion and take-no-cr*p rants against the "mighty mighty man." I'll take that above "my girlfriend left me and I'm sad" rock-pop anyday.
The problem is that the raw, lo-fi instrumentation is a bit too alike from one song to the next -- for example, the drum intro to "Closed For the Season" appears a few songs ago, although in a shorter form. Each one is a boiling, roiling mass of guitar, bass and smashing drums -- incredibly catchy, full of righteous rage, but very similar to the songs around them.
Howlin' Pelle Almqvist lives up to his name here. He has pretty ordinary singing, but really shines when he lets rip with his raw vocals. And their songwriting drips with rebellion and anger. Heck, you don't even have to hear the songs -- just read the titles: "What's that Spell... Go To Hell!", "AKA I-D-I-O-T" and "I'm A Wicked One."
"Barely Legal" isn't quite as good as their breakout album -- it needs a bit more musical variety. But it is the sort of endearingly nasty punk-rock that this Swedish band has become famous for. Definitely recommended.
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by The Hives 
