Heard Here

The Hellacopters
High Visibility

The U.S. may not know Sweden for much more then the sticky-sweet melodies of ABBA and the Cardigans when it comes to the nation’s pop music output, but just give one listen to any one of the Hellacopters’s albums, and you’ll realize that there’s more to Sweden than dancing queens and blonde hair. Throw an original Star Wars lunch-box (c’mon, the keyboardist’s nickname is Boba Fett), a vintage Strat and a few bell-bottoms together in a blender, and you’ve got the Hellacopters. This quintet’s arena rock is a shamelessly nostalgic brand of pop music combining all the tight pants and loose guitar solos of any good ’70s rock act. And they’ve been doing it successfully all over Europe and Australia since the release of their first (and aptly named) album, Supershitty to the Max, in 1997.
This year saw the release of High Visibility — yet another hedonistic exploration of all the sex, drugs and racing stripes that made ’70s rock culture great. Behind every one of Nick Royale’s wails, you can hear the party backstage, and behind every one of Robert “Strings” Dahlqvist’s wahwah guitar solos, you can hear the groupies screaming in the wings. But though this record may shake like Chuck Berry, rattle like the Stooges and roll like Led Zeppelin, it fails to do justice to any of these legendary groups.
Sure, High Visibility leaves the listener with no doubts as to the band’s hardy musicianship. Royale and company blow through the 13 tracks on this record like they’re trying to squeeze a two-hour set into a half-hour gig, and Dahlqvist’s guitar heroics and Robert Eriksson’s frenzied drumming are as confident and inspired as any of their predecessors. The problem is that nothing terribly interesting gets accomplished along the way. The Hellacopters set the tone with the terrific opener “Hopeless Case of a Kid in Denial” and never quite move beyond its epic four-guitar stomp. If you hear this track, the semi-ballad “No Song Unheard” and the Zeppelin-esque “No One’s Gonna Do it for You,” you’ve heard the whole album.
And lyrically, the band does no better. With lyrics like “I got the drugs baby, you got the ticks ...I’m the teacher, and you’ve got detention,” you’ll be yearning for the days when Kurt Cobain’s self-deprecation and Eddie Vedder’s aching sensitivity made Poison’s and Motley Crüe’s chauvinism beg for major label support.
As High Visibility shows, the Hellacopters haven’t learned the lesson that successful nostalgia bands like the Strokes and the White Stripes learned long ago: that derivative style doesn’t necessarily mean derivative music. The problem is that High Visibility takes 40 minutes to do absolutely nothing original, and though it can be a blast to drink beer or play air guitar to, the Hellacopters’s music belongs in a museum more then it does your stereo.

–John MacDonald

After six months of anticipation and three months in European release, VNV Nation’s fourth album, Futureperfect, is finally available in the U.S. As some of you may know, VNV Nation is quite possibly the most widely known Electronic Body Music band in the world today. A genre popular in Europe for years now, EBM can be considered a highly melodic, beat-driven offshoot of industrial. In recent years the genre has greatly increased in notoriety particularly on college campuses and independent radio.
Arguably, the rise of EBM in the U.S. is more due to VNV Nation’s popularity than vice-versa. Attracting more attention than ever in 2000 by touring with fellow EBM megastars Apoptygma Berzerk, sales for VNV’s third album, Empires, skyrocketed. After the tour, Ronan Harris and Mark Jackson went back into the studio, returning with two versions of the maxi-single for “Genesis.” Thus, the wait for possibly the most highly-anticipated EBM album ever began. After difficulty with record labels and distributors, the second single, “Beloved,” was released and finally, Futureperfect saw record stores in 2002.
As expected, Futureperfect contains all the elements of a good VNV Nation album. It has a few driving, high-energy tunes (“Epicentre,” “Genesis,” “Fearless”), a couple slow, emotional tracks (“Holding On,” “Carbon”), one really driving instrumental (“Electronaut”), one perfect mid-tempo single (“Beloved”) and lots of political commentary. The album on the whole is an adrenaline rush with a soft, pretty break right in the middle. It shows great progress for VNV in terms of experimentation in tempo and sound texture, but it avoids losing any of the magic of a shout-along chorus.
Although, lyrically, the themes of desperation, environmental destruction and the importance of compassion may at times seem trite, the beats and words mesh well to create a sensation of empowerment coupled with feelings of hope and progress.
VNV = Victory not Vengeance. If you’re willing to buy it, it makes you feel pretty good.

–Monica Lee

Regardless of their tripped out name and claims to be a ’60s throwback band, Love Psychedelico does belong to the 21st century. This J-Pop band’s sound fits somewhere in the acoustic-electric music genre, perhaps somewhere between Sheryl Crow and those new cross-between-nü-metal-and-the-power-ballad bands — but much, much better.
A duo from Japan, vocalist Kumi and guitarist Sato Naoki started playing together in 1997 at Aoyama Gakuin University. They debuted with Greatest Hits (oddly enough) in January 2001 and became the soundtrack of public spaces. Nearly every combini and shop was still blaring the third track, “Last Smile,” when I left Japan in May. Japan’s equivalent to MTV-culture latched onto “Last Smile” for good reason. Kumi’s gritty dipthongs and charming British-Americanish accent (whether she’s singing in Japanese or English) are a step above Crow. She spins from one language to another, for example, “Kora dakiaeru / yorokobi ha sugisarushii / I never looked again…” — a seamless bilingual treat. Though, at times its impossible to tell which language she’s using.* But that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, some of the greatest rockstars of our time (i.e. Thom Yorke) are even more unintelligible.**
Other great tracks include “Your Song” and “I Mean Love Me;” the latter of the two shows more growl than the others (though I swear the intro is straight from the Rolling Stones). Kumi reveals her secret desire to be part of a more rural, new world tradition in the songs “Are You Still Dreaming Ever-free?” — a quick lil’ hill-billie ditty — and “These Days” — a really sweet ballad in which she actually sings “I want to be a cowgirl!” “Nostalgia ’69” is the only track that succeeds in evoking any kind of psychedelic spirit, however, the pithy plasticity more readily evokes sparkly peace keychains rather than muddy Woodstock.***

–Julie Johnson

* After an afternoon of trying my darndest to discern whether a few lines were in English or Japanese, I got my Japanese housemate to help me out and was relieved to find that she couldn’t puzzle it out either.

** Maybe Kumi’s starting a creolized version of the two, and, sure, it’s about time the U.S. and Japan consummated their love, anyway.

*** So this review sounds über-critical, but believe me when I say the album deserves some attention — they’re a diamond-in-the-rough of the usual designer waif-bands of the J-Pop scene.