The Hellacopters Grande Rock NUCLEAR BLAST

There have always been bands that, despite persistently threatening to break it big, never quite follow through on their apparent promise. Take Stockholm’s The Hellacopters, whose moment in rock’s spotlight seemed to have arrived in the late 90s when they appeared at the vanguard of an ostensibly unstoppable Swederock movement (alongside The Hives and Backyard Babies) that entranced the rock media but never actually delivered in the marketplace.

The Hellacopters started life in ’94 as a garage rock side-project for ex-Entombed drummer Nicke Andersson (vocals and guitar) and on-hiatus Backyard Babies guitarist Dregen. Following a pair of attention-grabbing albums that accentuated the amphetamine punk flash in Motörhead’s all-guns-blazin’ über-metal blueprint, Dregen returned to the Babies and Andersson set to work on Grande Rock.

With Dregen absent, keyboard player Anders ‘Boba Fett’ Lindström and touring guitarist Mattias Hellberg supplied extra licks, and the band mellowed fractionally toward a more classic, considered 70s-rock template. Andersson’s songwriting duly rose to the occasion and ’s material fell somewhere between the hook-driven catchiness of Kiss and the