Kaleo
A/B

Are you familiar with those lightning bolts out of the blue? Those sudden floods that turn the desert into an oasis?

We could define Kaleo that way, perhaps more as an oasis in the desert soul of today's music than a flood.

Sure, if I think about how I discovered them, I feel a bit inconsistent...

I first came across them in 2017, a year when I was just a 13-year-old kid playing video games; music hadn't yet knocked on my door, even though it played in the background of the main menu of my favorite game...

It was only in 2018 that I discovered Queen and The Beatles, and from there, the entire world of rock/progressive music and beyond from the mid to late 20th century.

Once you discover rock classics and fall in love with them, you start looking for them in your contemporaneity, and in my case, it's a search with little success... sure, I found my great idols (Arctic Monkeys), The White Stripes, the newly-born Maneskin, but the search never ends, it's constant with every listen.

I believe that the (relatively) old can be new and that it can pop up at any moment from around the corner like the best invention of modern technology.

Well, on one of those pointless evenings, while I was aimlessly scrolling through Spotify looking for some stimulus, I (re)discovered Kaleo.

At the start, I said I feel inconsistent due to the manner of discovery... that's because, as a lover of vinyl and physical music, I found enlightenment through streaming, and as a fan of niche music, I reconnected thanks to their most mainstream song, the one I heard in the videogame menu... namely "Way Down We Go."

Like all the most popular songs of various artists/groups, I consider it a fairly insignificant element... neither here nor there, but that doesn't surprise me.

A different story for "No Good," though; it's not mainstream, but it gets stuck in your head like a mosquito at 4 a.m. on a hot August night. However, you want to kill the mosquito, while you want to listen to "No Good" over and over again.

When I heard "Hot Blood," I thought, "here it is, the typical Icelandic electro-pop track... nothing else." (I have nothing against electro-pop, but my expectations were directed elsewhere). Then I realize that the track is catchy, starts to please me, and in the second half, it hits me hard (in a positive sense) with a dirty guitar riff just the way I like it.

In general, I like Kaleo's guitar, managing to be dirty, subtle yet also full-bodied, as in "I Can't Go On Without You."

Noteworthy are "Glass House," "Broken Bones," and "Save Yourself," they get into your head and don't easily leave.

But the real highlight is "Vor I Vaglaskogi"... let’s put aside (even if it’s hard not to dwell on these) the Icelandic language, and the arrangement, which is nothing short of sublime and moving: full of violins, harmonies, and minor tones...

The lyrics... to exponentially feel moved, you should translate and read the lyrics. Kaleo tells us about Vaglaskogur, one of Iceland's largest forests. It is famous for its birches; otherwise, it's a forest like many others... Kaleo clearly thinks very differently, as they paint a bucolic picture worthy of Virgil and D’Annunzio's "Pioggia del Pineto," a beautiful locus amoenus. After memorizing a couple of phrases, every listen evokes a whole new emotion compared to the first time.

Obviously, from Spotify, this album went straight into my vinyl collection, a piece that for a music lover (because here we find not only rock but a lot of soul, folk influences, and I must say even indie, with a pinch of garage) and for a lover of that fantastic land that is Iceland, cannot be missed.