REVIEW: Kent, Isola (BMG)
- Tim Mohr
Swedish bands have animated the European music scene for several years now, with groups like the Cardigans, the Wannadies, and Whale making particularly big splashes and representing the apexes of three distinct styles. Kent represent yet another strain of Swedish rock, having established themselves at the pinnacle of the domestic indie scene with a musical sensibility closer to Radiohead, the Smashing Pumpkins, or the Manic Street Preachers and anguished lyrics to match.
Kent have produced three albums in Sweden that make them as important to Swedish indie kids as the Smiths were to down-trodden popheads of the British isles in the 80s. But unlike most Swedish bands, Kent decided to sing in their native Swedish for those three records, leaving them all but unknown in other countries even as the Scandinavian Invasion sent other Swedish indie outfits around the world.
With an English version of Isola (Kent's third album) now available world-wide on BMG, Kent have finally drawn their linguistic curtain to reveal their dark, poetic words to listeners south of Malmo. While the intimacy that singing in Swedish allowed them to gain with their core audience at home may suffer, listeners elsewhere will be able to comfort Swedish fans by joining them in adoration of Kent.
Anchored by a churning bass not dissimilar to that on Cure tracks such as "Fascination Street" or latter-day Smashing Pumpkins' records, Kent add a wash of fuzzed guitars to mid-tempo songs about longing. The atmosphere of Isola is rather like Radiohead without the prog-rock trappings of OK Computer.
The lyrics, obviously taken as seriously by the band in English as in Swedish, demonstrate an incredible grasp of the dynamics of sharing and loss involved in human ties. "Speak/I don't need to speak/You're satisfied with silence/Scream/I won't speak I'll scream/Sleep/And all my energy/I waste on dreams of silence," sings Joakim Berg in "If You Were Here."
In "Elvis" his voice soars with the same sense of imminent crash that is so important to the catharctic energy of Radiohead, Geneva, the Manic Street Preachers: "So now you're stealing my time/All the hours that I once/stole from you/I never thought you would mind/But I can see you do."
Isola never explodes with the amplified cacauphony of louder portions of the Radiohead canon--Kent never indulge themselves with the white-noise-drenched release of a "My Iron Lung," for instance--but the evocation of wrenching emotional tension on Isola is every bit as eloquent and powerful as that on display in The Bends. The emotional origins of Kent songs sound as immediate and tangible as those of the Manic Street Preachers or Stereophonics, though, again, Kent eschew the musical bombast and frenetic energy of the Welsh bands.
Kent show a side of Swedish youth culture that the post-Cardigans groups and Beatlesque pop bands avoid: the depression that, among other things, mandates high alcohol taxes to keep the kids from drinking themselves to death. Most of their compatriots fend of the (literal) darkness with a light approach to music; in embracing the (metaphoric) darkness around them, Kent produce a sound that soothes the listener with implied empathy.
