Hellacopters

Grande Rock Revisited NUCLEAR BLAST

Scandinavian sleaze rockers’ 1999 album gets touched up.

Whenever you hear of an artist going back to re-record their best-loved albums from back in the day, there’s a strong temptation to doubt the wisdom behind it. Sure, sometimes there’s a laudable motivation to ‘improve’ on the original, iron out all those glitches and creases that have been bugging them for decades. Sometimes there’s an unspoken but even more pressing spur at work: to release a version of the record to which they will own the rights and don’t have to share the royalties with that label/management they got tied into a dodgy deal with back when they were too young, too naive and too poor to hire a decent lawyer.

In the case of leading lovable Swedish scuzz-rock rogues The Hellacopters, one suspects it was the former factor that drove their decision to reissue 1999’s Grande Rock as a double set, with a new remix of the songs with new elements added. At the time, they’d just lost the services of guitarist Andreas ‘Dregen’ Svensson (who’d joined the band while his alma mater and fellow travellers the Backyard Babies were on hiatus, then went back to them). Keyboard player Anders Lindstrom deputised ably on rhythm guitar, but in the band’s view they actually overdid it on the six-string front.

“We all love loud guitars,” singer/ lead guitarist Nicke Andersson has explained, “but not at the expense of drums and bass.”

He has a point – tracks such as Already Now are snarling, trebly affairs on the original, which in several cases benefit from a beefed up bottom end on the ‘revisited’ readings, not to mention a generally superior mastering. The addition of lost Hellacopter Dregen’s new contributions to the new versions adds further punch too.

To some ears, though, there will be a charm to the original recordings that is slightly neutered by the additional elements. Welcome To Hell has a certain ragged, desperate feel to the vocal before it cranks up with Stonesy ‘woo woo’ backing vocals and histrionic fretstrangling backing. On the revisited version the guitar is cleaner and the vocal becomes a joint, chanted enterprise – a rabble-rousing treatment they repeat on several tracks, to questionable effect. Nonetheless, this release makes Grande Rock available affordably on vinyl for the first time in years, and it’s up to you to decide if you prefer the remake or the warts-and-all but exhilarating original.