1) Mirage; 2) Var är vi nu?; 3) Skogarna; 4) La belle epoque; 5) Svart snö; 6) Allt har sin tid; 7) Innan himlen fall ner; 8) Din enda vän; 9) Godhet; 10) Simmaren; 11) Den andra sidan
A potentially interesting album left cruising on autopilot.
Key tracks: "Mirage", "Skogarna", "La belle epoque"
Kent went from a clear rock band to a hybrid of synth pop and rock all the way back in 2007 and you would reckon that by the time I would talk about their 2014 album, that change wouldn't be something that needs to be mentioned any longer. We get it, they changed sound, and nearly a decade after it happened it's now the norm for the band, no longer anything strange or bewildering. But Kent did keep tweaking that sound, exploring different frontiers that the change had cleared the pathway for, and so while there is a clear split of two halves in the band's discography, Kent had avoided repeating themselves after that halfway point. Even so, it is 2014's Tigerdrottningen where there’s a sense of Kent being plateaued. First hearing the album at its release, it was the first time my main takeaway from a new Kent album was that it sure sounds like a Kent album through and through: no surprises, no revelations, simply exactly what I expected to hear from them at this point and little more. And long story short, and review TL;DR, but that's still the primary take I have on Tigerdrottningen. It's where the comfortable corner the band had established for themselves had started to sound perhaps too tight.
Tigerdrottningen is so close to being a really fascinating album. It's a really charged record, sometimes even angry and even though the music is still predominantly bright, there's a sharper hit to its production that sounds urgent and determinedly pointed. Joakim Berg has clearly reached some kind of a boiling point and there's a heavier political lean to the album’s lyrics, often just as simple off-the-cuff lines absolutely laced with poison. It comes to surface on "La belle epoque", a near-formless rant about the state of modern Sweden and the hypocrisy among its citizens, and "Skogarna" which distills the hollow hopelessness of being stuck somewhere you have no affinity for in a political climate that ensures that hope never grows (and there's a fantastic self-referential line too about hearing your old hit song from the nearby radio, which is given the honour of the final twist of the knife in the gut). Many Kent albums have traded on melancholy, but Tigerdrottningen is fed up about it and sounds like it’s about to take action. But it can’t keep up what it hints at.
Tigerdrottningen's flaws aren't in how it does nothing new - and if we are honest, it does present some tweaks to Kent's standard formula, most clearly with the backing vocalists who follow and sometimes trade lines with Berg across the record, giving the band's traditional vocal harmonies their own distinct character. Rather, the problems lie in how absurdly frontloaded the album is and how badly it trails off afterwards, with the first four tracks offering a genuinely compelling vision of a record built on angry synth rhythms, which turns out to somehow lead into a disappointingly plain finale that bins Kent’s tradition to always finish on a grand high. The bulk of Tigerdrottningen is decently enjoyable but completely running on creative autopilot and it leaves little trace apart from the occasional obvious catch like the English-language movie sample that starts off "Din enda vän" is by far the song's most memorable part. Few sparks of light guide the way, i.e. the intensifying end of "Allt har sin tid" and the miniature line-trade drama of "Godhet" (both songs where the backing vocals shine), but for most parts Tigerdrottningen lacks in the areas Kent usually shines and doesn’t seem too bothered to try too hard to either. It's not so much unmemorable as it is just transparent: they’re songs you enjoy enough to keep listening to when they come up on shuffle, but there’s a reason why that’s the heaviest exposure they get. This is Kent running through the motions, channelling Kent The Brand rather than the band that would seek to innovate and reinvent with each new move, and the songs stick as much or as little as you'd expect in that regard.
But there is that initial quadruplet of tracks where Tigerdrottningen is on a mission you want to believe in. "Mirage" is a mirrorball that someone has smashed to pieces and now wields one of the shards as a blade; a disco giant that barely holds its bitterness in control, reinterpreting Kent in a way that much of the rest of the album tries to live up to and doesn't reach. "Var är vi nu?" goes for the stadium anthem antics of the previous album but creates a powerful lament out of it, properly introducing the album's backing vocalists and makes a strong business case for keeping them around (and Kent would). "Skogarna" and "La belle epoque" are, as mentioned, Tigerdrottningen's two most obviously angry songs and (perhaps not coincidentally) the record's two greatest moments, yet they interpret that intensity in such different ways. "Skogarna" is bubbling and bouncy, bearing the album's most chart-friendly chorus that's a beautifully pure euphoric rush of fluttering synths, hiding the song's true heart so effectively. Meanwhile "La belle epoque" throws it in the open. It puts Berg's voice right in the center, breathlessly running from one sarcastic and nihilistic line to another, resembling a spoken word poem that someone put over on a steady programmed beat and strings that sound like a mob forming a circle around you, only coming up for air for its brief, dramatic choruses. If Tigerdrottningen is Kent on autopilot, it's unbelievable how they managed to still come up with four songs this strong; and it's downright cruel for the listener they were put right in the beginning, one after another.
A mid-tier, disappointing Kent album is still, overall, a good album - just not one that inspires. Despite its pointed lyrics Tigerdrottningen is ironically an album that has very little to say, from a musical perspective: rather than coming up with something novel it rephrases previous ideas instead, and the few new tricks it does employ are more window dressing than anything substantial. It leaves an impression of Kent either running out of ideas or finding themselves unable to build a whole album out of the ones they did have. For a band on their third decade and album count in double digits, it’s inevitable that a record like this happens and kudos to Kent for making it this far before it happened - but like so many of those records, even though it’s a decent album, even a fan knows deep down in their heart that it just isn’t anything special despite its moments of old brilliance flashing through.
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