Kent
En Plats I Solen

"Several tracks initially written for "Röd" were left unfinished, and we wanted to record them while they were still fresh," says Joakim Berg, the voice and main songwriter of Kent, upon the release of this "En Plats I Solen" just 9 months after the previous studio album.

The album was released at the end of June 2010 and will kick off a summer tour for the group mainly held during Scandinavian music festivals. It's an album of outtakes from "Röd", and you can tell; not so much in the quality of the 10 songs it consists of, but in the arrangements that seem quite rushed and eager to reach a finished form as quickly as possible. The album was recorded during the winter tour that took the group around Northern Europe, and the desire to quickly reach a finished product unfortunately negatively impacted its final outcome, although it remains still a good-quality album even though it is clearly inferior to many previous ones.

To understand this, just listen to track number 10: something Kent has always managed to do beautifully is to conceive the concluding track of an album, which often turned out to be the best part of the entire work. Here you can clearly hear that the sad "Passagerare" could easily follow this trend, but instead, it seems almost cut, mutilated of a melancholic final coda that would have been fitting but, instead, isn't there. Nonetheless, it remains a good piece, and the album, although it should be considered an appendix of the giant "Röd", is full of deserving tracks: "Gamla Ullevi" and "Skisser för sommaren", released together on the same single, have the task of announcing to the Scandinavian masses that Kent has returned unexpectedly, so quickly, and they perform their task decently, providing a business card for what promises to be a much sunnier and lighter album compared to the dense and elaborate atmospheres of its predecessor. The lyrics have always represented the most difficult hurdle to overcome when approaching the band's music, as either you know Swedish or rely on translations found here and there. Once this hurdle is overcome, however, it is immediately evident that from this point of view, too, the album is much less challenging than usual: the mind of Joakim Berg is never simple, but some pieces of this work differ significantly from the intricate and cryptic compositions of some previous works ("Gamla Ullevi" essentially says "I think of you" for most of the song, "Skisser för sommaren" does the same with "say it again, lalala").

Even in this context, however, Kent manages to display their main sad, melancholic side, their gray veil over the world and weave it everywhere, for example, in "Team Building", one of the most interesting episodes, where Berg navigates an arrangement that conveys anxiety. "Ismael" is probably the only track that could have appeared on "Röd" without being out of place; the best-achieved thing on the whole album, it was also released as a single along with "Varje gång du möter min blick", more sober and delicate.

The style remains the electro-rock that characterizes the band's recent period, but in this case, the lack of substantial production support is noticeably felt; haste is a bad advisor, but when it comes to Kent, even following bad advice, you always end up in a place in the sun.