E-Mail This Article to a Friend Hooked (continued)

Although Ginger bristles at the suggestion that he’s a pop songwriter, the Wildhearts have a knack for writing great pop songs. (In England, as their official bios never hesitate to point out, they have more Top 20 hits than the Spice Girls and Christina Aguilera combined.) The title of Riff After Riff plays up their dual-guitar attack, but the most distinctive elements of their songs are their pristine, classic, three- and four-part harmonies — their talent for which makes nearly every chorus soar and glide like a Mutt Lange production. (Ask Ginger who he takes his cues from on harmony and he’ll cite his affinity for the Everly Brothers and C&W before mentioning Queen’s Roger Taylor and Sweet’s Steve Priest.)

Their hooks are not limited to choruses. The verses have hooks. The bridges have hooks. The hooks have hooks. When Ginger and the boys hit Oslo this past February, everyone in the audience was eager to tell them how Norway deathpunks Turbonegro had built an entire song — "Drenched in Blood" — around the vocal hook from the chorus of the Wildhearts classic "Just in Lust." Ginger’s response? Big deal, there’s plenty more where that came from.

But tracking down the Wildhearts’ recorded output remains a tricky proposition, as it was even during the band’s heyday. By the time the group fragmented — around the turn of the century, after their most divisive album, 1997’s Endless, Nameless (Mushroom), a frazzled, needle-in-the-red production where Weezer-worthy hooks teetered on the brink of hardcore-punk extinction — they’d released just three proper studio albums and a crateload of singles. They had a maddening propensity for releasing B-side collections padded with filler while burying some of their finest moments, and their most miserable lyrics were often attached to their catchiest melodies. For every radio-ready hit like "Love U til I Don’t," which suggested what the New York Dolls might’ve sounded like if they’d lived into the ’90s, there were two or three equally memorable songs whose volatility kept them off the radio. You can’t bleep "My Baby Is a Headfuck" when the title is the chorus, and "Just in Lust" is typical of their best tracks in that its frictionless harmonies were unlikely to conceal a lyric about testicles.

All of which makes the "reunion" album The Wildhearts Must Be Destroyed — their most consistently brilliant release since P.H.U.Q. — all the more surprising. "We never said we were gonna split up in the first place," Ginger reminds me. "We always said we were gonna take a break and sort out our drug problems. Some of us did a better job than others." In the interim, Ginger debuted his solo band, the Silver Ginger 5, and became a father. Bassist Danny McCormack formed the bubblegum-punk outfit the Yo-Yo’s and put out an undeservedly ignored album on Sub Pop in 2000. And on the eve of the Destroyed sessions, McCormack entered rehab and hasn’t rejoined the band since. The disc manages to retain all of the Wildhearts’ signatures — breathless four-part harmony, shattering metal riffs, punk-rock attitude — while cranking the hooks to 11.

Over the years, Ginger has come close to death as often as he’s come close to fame, but Destroyed is an album of love songs. The moods range from the apocalyptic "Get Your Groove On" — unexpurgated Amen-strength metallicized hardcore until it gets to a bittersweet chorus that sounds like recent Shania Twain — to the preternaturally serene "One Love, One Life, and One Girl." "Only Love" and "Someone That Won’t Let Me Go" rival such classic Wildhearts anthems as "Sick of Drugs" and "Just in Lust," and "Top of the World" might just be their "Paradise City." "I’m from the Barry Manilow generation — you gotta be careful what you call those things," Ginger admits. "But they’re all songs about the different sides and parameters of love — the compromise and the benefits. There’s a lot of love from a paternal point of view, and there’s a lot of basic, primal, two-o’clock-in-the-morning love, and then there’s some of the deeper, æthereal, I-hope-there’s-someone-there-for-me-when-I-get-off-this-shitty-planet kind of love. There’s no Tom-Hanks-movie love. It’s not Steven Spielberg love. It’s love that comes with cuts and bruises."

Which, as Ginger would be the first to proclaim, is the only kind worth fighting for. "We’re being blessed at the moment. We’re lucky enough to have ended up with a good, clean, focused band. We never had that kind of discipline, and it’s nice to have now after all these years. It took a while, we’re a bit stupid, but we got there."

The Wildhearts open for the Darkness this Saturday, April 3, at Avalon, 15 Lansdowne Street in Boston, and this Sunday, April 4, at Lupo’s at the Strand, 79 Washington Street in Providence. Both shows are officially sold out.