I’m already beginning to regret my decision to devote an entire month to the early-2000s garage rock revival. From the perspective of 2025, the Strokes debut album is a little underwhelming, but it undoubtedly succeeded in channelling a certain detached and hedonistic millennial zeitgeist, while a good number of its standout tracks were undeniably catchy and memorable. But having now moved on to some of the music that it inspired or was contemporaneous to, I’m slowly starting to wonder if this “scene” was anything more than a figment of music journalists’ imaginations, or perhaps a canny marketing campaign designed to polish a selection of turds.
To wit, I’ve subsequently listened to two of the records commonly associated with the garage rock revival, Elephant by the White Stripes and Tyrannosaurus Hives by the Hives, and the experience has been so profoundly enervating and arduous that I rather wish I’d never embarked on the entire misguided enterprise. Apart from a small number of obvious exceptions, both records are almost wholly devoid of what idiot savant Liam Gallagher would class as “tunes.” Instead, the listener is confronted by a succession of unashamed throwbacks to, in the case of Elephant, a tedious and primitive conjuring of late-60s rock and, in the case of Tyrannosaurus Hives, splenetic 70s punk rendered sellable with a bit of millennial irony and radio polish.
For almost its entire 30-minute duration, Tyrannosaurus Hives comprises an unceasing succession of short, sharp, fast, forgettable pop-punk screeds with shouty vocals. It tears forth at a million miles an hour, a hyper-caffeinated and tuneless miasma of frantic and largely indistinguishable three-minute slaps to the face. Only the Television-like angularity of “Walk Idiot Walk” and the cartoonish theatricality of “Diabolical Scheme” deviate from this dispiriting formula, which was surely conceived with a live environment in mind, to “get the kids bouncing.” When stretched out over the course of an entire record, however, it becomes almost unendurable, despite the mercifully short running time. Probably the Hives thought that they sounded like the Jam, whereas in actual fact, their style is more reminiscent of insufferable slacker pop punk like Green Day or Blink 182.
For the most part, the lyrics entirely fail to compensate for this conspicuous lack of melody and musical imagination. Some of them could perhaps be considered fashionably ironic attempts at “social criticism” – the crashing opener “Abra Cadaver” and the tightly wound “Walk Idiot Walk” lampoon corporate conformity, while “B is for Brutus” and “Diabolical Scheme” are more diffusely rebellious, though of course, not in such a way as to compromise the Hives’ carefully cultivated tongue-in-cheek coolness. “Dead Quote Olympics” has some genuinely amusing lyrics about pretentious rockstars drawing liberally on famous authors in order to advertise their learning, though the music is as forgettable as everything else on the album.
There’s also a gamut of tracks that might charitably be considered “relationship songs” – “Two-Timing Touch and Broken Bones”, “A Little More for Little You”, “Love in Plaster” – and each leaves as little of an impression as the last. “Missing Link” briefly ignites a flicker of intrigue, mainly because its lyrics about addiction and self-destruction are marginally less nebulous than almost everything that has preceded it. By this point on the album, however, the bar is very low indeed.
Overall, listening to Is This It?, Elephant, and Tyrannosaurus Hives has done anything but whet my appetite for future incursions into the garage rock revival. In fact, these records have only lent succour to my growing suspicion that the entire scene comprised an emphatic triumph of style over substance, whereby a conspiracy of wily record executives presented a selection of elegantly wasted, suit-wearing, bewildered-looking pretty boys to an audience of voracious female undergrads looking for someone dreamy but also unthreateningly effeminate to take home and smoke a spliff with while deconstructing Abbey Road. Obviously, this is the oldest trick in the book from the perspective of selling rock music, but at least the likes of T.Rex and Duran Duran delivered at least one album’s worth of great songs, while managing not to be so unrepentantly derivative.
Overall rating: *
Standout track: “Walk Idiot Walk”