If punk rock taught us anything, it was to distrust men like these. Drawing gleefully on every pompous cliché that the annals of rock history can offer, The Hellacopters play heavy metal the hedonist's way: jeans are to be stonewashed and bloodflow-restrictingly tight; hair must reach the collar; guitar solos always use the whole neck; and if a song clocks in at over four minutes, it's already getting cold. Even to jaded ears, though, High Visibility sounds something of a triumph. The Hellacopters' major label debut--they've previous served a lengthy spell on American stoner label Man's Ruin, followed by a transitory period scrubbing up the grunge generation on Sub Pop--finds this Swedish five-piece cutting back on the frills and turning up the thrills, spiriting up the memory of the MC5 on "Baby Borderline", drawing on "Brown Sugar"-era Rolling Stones for the piano-clatter bar-room boogie of "I Wanna Touch" and tapping into the raw teen energy of The Ramones on "Hopeless Case Of A Kid In Denial". If you're a believer in the maxim that rock & roll will never die, then look no further; while the old punks fuss and fret over the long-hollow ethics of anarchy, The Hellacopters are turning up their amps to shake the foundations. --Louis Pattison