1) Kungen är död; 2) Revolt III; 3) Musik non stop; 4) Kevlarsjäl; 5) Ett tidsfördriv att dö for; 6) Stoppa mig Juni (Lilla ego); 7) En himmelsk drog; 8) Stanna hos mig; 9) Cowboys; 10) Beskyddaren; 11) Berg & dalvana; 12) Insekter; 13) Visslaren
There's a good album there somewhere, underneath all the padding, layers and extraneous minutes....
Hagnesta Hill follows Kent’s climb to the top. The preceding Isola made them huge in their native Sweden and in the surrounding countries, immediately turning them from small town hopefuls on a steady rise to one of the country’s top artists. How bands handle this kind of ascent to fame and, more concretely, the follow-up album is always a question mark, and you often find that the acts start upscaling their efforts to make a self-consciously Big Album to match that big success they're enjoying.
Hagnesta Hill is a Big Album, in more ways than one. Its thirteen tracks rack up a sizeable 60-odd minute length, and most of those songs veer around the 5-7 minute territory. They’re all immaculately polished in their production and layered with studio magic and additional instruments, with pristinely modern, electronic elements slipping into the stylish guitar sound (in 1999 this was still novel and verging on trendy). It's bold, grand and loud. It’s the kind of record that happens when bands unlock an infinite budget and endless high-end studio time, and somewhere in the back of their minds they’re fully aware that they might lose all of that just as fast.
What separates Hagnesta Hill from other albums of its degree is that Kent aren't just trying to repeat Isola's success. Instead, they're actively making moves towards new sounds and using this big breakthrough as means to an end to hone their new ideas. After three albums of effectively polishing the same building blocks until they became sturdy and great, Hagnesta Hill is Kent’s first real piece of evolution: they had already started to play around with more programmed elements and a slicker sound on parts of Isola, and those initial seeds are now starting to grow. While still characterised by their guitars, Kent are making a point about not being defined by them and Hagnesta Hill starts exploring other ways to lead a song. It sees the band heading both towards wider artistic oceans with atmospheric textures and contemplative valleys of sound (the haunted piano of "Ett tidsfördriv att dö for", the ambient ballad "Cowboys"), as well as flirting with unashamed pop hooks with the bass groove and disco beat of “Musik non stop” and the sharp drum processing of “En himmelsk drog”. The electronically laced later half of their career is quietly being foreshadowed here, even if in the core Kent at this stage are still more in tune with their precious 90s rock bands. They're still testing things around more than leaping right into the unknown, and so Hagnesta Hill is a clear transitional record for the band. Those face challenges on their own already - and then Kent go and drown all that progress underneath everything else they've stuffed on the record.
Hagnesta Hill is a record that's altogether too much in every way, and it suffers for it. There's no reason any of its songs should be as long as they are, with even the best cuts deserving a good minute's worth of shaving, and when all piled together the album itself feels like a never-ending marathon. Thirteen tracks doesn't sound like much and there are plenty of almost breezy hour-long records, but Hagnesta Hill feels twice as long not just because of how much the songs meander, but also because Kent haven't actually got all that much to say with them - and so it's like they're piling everything else onto the songs to distract from that. There's little here that feels as inspired as even the most middle-of-the-road cuts of Isola and something like the six-minute plodding dreaminess of "Cowboys" is straight up padding, no matter how important and atmospheric it tries to sound. At worst the band straight-up repeat themselves: the dramatic arena guitar walls of "Kevlarsjäl" are something we've already heard from Kent ten times over, and the closing "Visslaren" is such a retread of Isola's iconic "747" (right down to the 7:47 length) that Kent aren't even trying to hide it. But you can't repeat the same lightning strike twice with the same force, and while the primitive "me like big music" part of my brain can get my foot tapping to its rock-out finale, it's obvious why "Visslaren" gets forgotten when people talk about Kent's bombastic album closers. Even if the horns in the first half are genuinely rather beautiful and their buried reappearance towards the end is inspired.
Hagnesta Hill still managed to achieve what Big Albums are meant to achieve, and it kept Kent's momentum going. On the positive side, Kent learned from their mistakes and swung back onto the race track soon thereafter. On the downside, Hagnesta Hill itself isn’t much of a winner. For someone growing up in the Nordics at the time it feels like an integral part of the cultural zeitgeist and I remember vividly just how widespread its presence was. I keep forgetting about the actual music though, and so it's more a representative of Kent's place in the world at the time rather than something that I'd remember as an actual piece of work. Hagnesta Hill is an alright record, but it's gotten so buried underneath the band's ambitions that it's ended up as one of their least memorable works outside of its context.
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