Kent
Isola

THE REVIEW

In August 1999, I was with my father in Rockville (a few kilometers from Washington D.C.), and he, being a music fanatic like me, took me to a hole-in-the-wall store selling used CDs at bargain prices.
While rummaging with a high rate of salivation, I stumbled upon Kent. I had only heard one of their songs, "If You Were Here," which immediately struck me as beautiful: a raspy voice, yet capable of reaching high tones, and guitars composing the most classic wall of sound.
"If it doesn't work out," I told myself, "I'll have bought yet another copy of Oasis with the advantage of paying very little for it."

Once the CD was in the player, "Lifesavers" immediately enveloped me, taking me back to the sound of Airbag-My Iron Lung by Radiohead, but this time the voice was only in falsetto and the guitars were "sharp" like lemon juice.
Then it was the turn of "Things She Said" and... "Damn, these are The Verve of Sonnet, or rather... these are better than The Verve of Sonnet!"
When the ballad "Unprofessional" came up, U2 of Ultra Violet was the only musical reference to associate with that romantic rhythm and that unique voice in its timbre and its melancholic progression: the perfect meeting point between Thom Yorke and good old Billy Corgan (I can't describe them any better than that).

My brain went wild: all the best of 90s English rock in just 4 songs; these guys had absorbed all the beauty music had to offer a few years earlier and reworked it, adding an indescribable sadness and something cold, as candid as Swedish snow.
Yes, damn it, they are Swedish! That's why there's so much coldness, so much whiteness, so many soul sighs in their songs.

As the days went by, the CD started to literally make me "travel" and accompanied me in the best way during my American summer.
The lyrics are literally beautiful and poetic in the purest sense of the word, as you no longer hear in the current rock scene: maybe naming Jeff Buckley is too much, but we're almost there, guys... TRY TO BELIEVE!!

Little curiosity: Kent is a band that writes an entire album in Swedish and then adapts the music to the lyrics reworked in English by the singer Joakim Berg, and if the album in Swedish sells, the English version also enters the market: for the first two albums it went well. Let's hope it will be the same for the future.