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Spin Review
By Kris | January 20, 2004
From the forthcoming issue of SPIN (Feb 2004), “The Wildhearts Must Be Destroyed” reviewed by Doug Brod is the highest rated album reviewed, even on import and without having a US label backing it up!
Read on for the full review…
For better, not worse, the Wildhearts may the least fashionable band in rock’n’roll: too metal for pop fans, too pop for metalheads, fun but necessarily funny. And they’ve made the catchiest hard-rock record you’ll hear this year.
Myriad line-up changes, drug madness, and soured record deals have led the Wildhearts to release only a handful of legit studio albums in their 14-year career, through their singles still routinely crash the U.K. Top 40. On Destroyed – which re-teams singer/guitarist Ginger with two of the guys who played on the band’s lone U.S. release, 1993’s Earth vs. the Wildhearts – they come off like a British version of another great singles band, Cheap Trick, especially since “Only Love” and “Top Of The World” are each a word away from being Cheap Trick titles, while yet another, “It’s All Up To Me” does a reversal on that band’s “It’s Up To You”.
Gearhead Records (first US home to the Hives) will release a raucous B-sides collection here in March, but Destroyed better displays Ginger mastery of the roaring riff and indelible refrain. The raging “Nexus Icon” begins with a distorted staccato howl decrying celebrity worship and segues into the disarmingly sweet- natured “Only Love,” which suggests the Beatles on steroids – or at least ephedrines. On “Someone That Won’t Let Me Go,” Ginger needs a lover who’s “Gonna make me feel I truly am the best that I can get,” and by the 2.10 mark, he’s delivering a thrilling pitch shift to rival the key change in “Livin’ On A Prayer.”
Things get ferocious with “Get Your Groove On,” a lockstep thrash featuring guest screams by the Darkness’ Justin Hawkins. But at heart Ginger is a lover man, and he saves his choicest words for “So Into You,” with witty self deprecation (“I like your taste in outfits/ But I love your taste in misfits”) and lets a Police-style interlude stands so close to the glammed-out crunch. If this is unfashionable, bring on the drum solos.
DOUG BROD – EXECUTIVE EDITOR SPIN
GRADE A
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