R.E.M. - R.E.M. at the BBC (2018)

CD1: Live Sessions 1) World Leader Pretend (Into the Night 1991); 2) Fretless (Into the Night 1991); 3) Half a World Away (Into the Night 1991); 4) Radio Song (Into the Night 1991); 5) Losing My Religion (Into the Night 1991); 6) Love Is All Around (Into the Night 1991); 7) Walk Unafraid (John Peel Session 1998); 8) Daysleeper (John Peel Session 1998); 9) Lotus (John Peel Session 1998); 10) At My Most Beautiful (John Peel Session 1998); 11) Bad Day (Mark and Lard 2003); 12) Orange Crush (Mark and Lard 2003); 13) Man on the Moon (Drivetime 2003); 14) Imitation of Life (Drivetime 2003); 15) Supernatural Superserious (Radio 1 Live Lounge 2008); 16) Munich (Radio 1 Live Lounge 2008)
CD2: John Peel Session (1998): 1) Introduction; 2) Losing My Religion; 3) New Test Leper; 4) Lotus; 5) Parakeet; 6) Electrolite; 7) Perfect Circle; 8) The Apologist; 9) Band Introductions; 10) Daysleeper; 11) Country Feedback; 12) At My Most Beautiful; 13) Walk Unafraid; 14) Man on the Moon
CD3: Rock City (1984): 1) Second Guessing; 2) Hyena; 3) Talk About the Passion; 4) West of the Fields; 5) (Don't Go Back To) Rockville; 6) Auctioneer (Another Engine); 7) So. Central Rain; 8) Old Man Kensey; 9) Gardening at Night; 10) 9-9/Hey Diddle Diddle/Feeling Gravity's Pull; 11) Windout; 12) Driver 8; 13) Pretty Persuasion; 14) Radio Free Europe; 15) Wendell Gee; 16) Carnival of Sorts (Boxcars)
CD4: The National Bowl (1995): 1) What's the Frequency, Kenneth?; 2) Crush With Eyeliner; 3) Drive; 4) Turn You Inside-Out; 5) Try Not to Breathe; 6) I Took Your Name; 7) Undertow; 8) Bang and Blame; 9) I Don't Sleep, I Dream; 10) Strange Currencies; 11) Revolution; 12) Tongue
CD5: The National Bowl (1995): 1) Man on the Moon; 2) Country Feedback; 3) Half a World Away; 4) Losing My Religion; 5) Pop Song 89; 6) Finest Worksong; 7) Get Up; 8) Star 69; 9) Let Me In; 10) Everybody Hurts; 11) Fall on Me; 12) Departure; 13) It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)
CD6: Glastonbury (1999): 1) Lotus; 2) What's the Frequency, Kenneth?; 3) So Fast, So Numb; 4) The Apologist; 5) Fall on Me; 6) Daysleeper; 7) The Wake-Up Bomb; 8) The One I Love; 9) Sweetness Follows; 10) At My Most Beautiful
CD7: Glastonbury (1999): 1) Losing My Religion; 2) Everybody Hurts; 3) Walk Unafraid; 4) Star 69; 5) Finest Worksong; 6) Man on the Moon; 7) Why Not Smile; 8) Crush with Eyeliner; 9) Tongue; 10) Cuyahoga; 11) It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)
CD8: St. James' Church (2004): 1) Intro; 2) So Fast, So Numb; 3) Boy in the Well; 4) I Wanted to Be Wrong; 5) E-Bow the Letter (with Thom Yorke); 6) Around the Sun; 7) Aftermath; 8) Losing My Religion; 9) Walk Unafraid; 10) Leaving New York; 11) Imitation of Life; 12) Man on the Moon

The people's R.E.M. on the people's channel, from one decade to the next. If nothing else, you can say they've been a staggeringly consistent live act throughout the years.

Key tracks: How on earth could I even begin to choose here? Have you seen that tracklist?

The paradox of R.E.M. at the BBC is that the only kind of person who would ever think to get the chunky 8-CD, 1-DVD boxset version of this album instead of the summarised 2CD-edition is going to be an obsessive R.E.M. geek, and yet it's those completionist geeks who are arguably going to get the least out of this box.

On paper - and in reality as well - this is certainly an impressive set. Collecting together a number of concerts BBC have captured on tape over the decades, the spread of the sets is massive. The early 1984 gig captures R.E.M. during a time frame that's rarely been recorded in this quality and the 1998 John Peel session sees the band go through a number of rare Up deep cuts (which for any Up-truther like myself is manna from heaven), whereas the triumphant shots of the band on top of the world between the electrified rock and roll fever of the 1995 gig and the joyously hit-gloating 1999 Glastonbury headline set show just what a commanding force the band were at their peak years. The disparate radio session cuts compiled together on the first disc and the last set's intimate Around the Sun period concert where they traded arenas for a church round off the selection well. It's a display of R.E.M. literally through the decades and each time they knock it out of the park, with the recording quality staying solid throughout. You really can't complain if you're a fan and you're not averse to live material.

It just... gets repetitive, and occasionally even redundant if you are a fan and you're not averse to live material, meaning that you've picked up any of the other official live releases along the way like I have. These are all concerts for the general public so you'll be hearing the hits and particular fan favourites constantly ("Losing My Religion" and "Man on the Moon" are literally on every concert apart from the 1984 one) and though it's in a way interesting to track their live arrangements through the years, they're never that different. A good third of the boxset is around the 1998-1999 period as well, so no real change beyond the audience size. The 2004 gig is effectively just an abridged version of 2007's Live with the only real new feature being Thom Yorke backing Stipe so very hauntingly on "E-Bow the Letter" (even if it's not as incredible as the 1998 Tibetan Freedom rendition with Mr. Yorke also in tow). The first disc is by far the worst of the lot: if you've heard the MTV Unplugged sets third of the disc sounds like a reprise, and there's four songs taken literally from a 1998 John Peel Session, which you'll then hear in its full (on a separate night) on the very next disc. The only thing from the first disc that really feels like it warrants a separate release are the neat acoustic takes on "Supernatural Superserious" and Editors' "Munich", both of which display yet another period the box otherwise doesn't touch.

Practically speaking those are only issues if you've heard all the other live albums the band have released already and you've generally become so familiar with this band's touring output that there's no real excitement or revelation involved in these sets. Which is why for a completionist like myself this might be a little more underwhelming than you'd think because it's all very familiar territory, tried and tested and heard through b-sides, live DVDs and other concert recordings. But, don't let that make you think that the actual sets aren't quality - R.E.M. is absolutely on point on each and every single one of these and the 1984 and 1995 sets are particular delights. It's great to hear the band young and hungry on the former, playing parts of the back catalogue that they'd only really revisit when they were old veterans on Live at the Olympia nostalgia fest; meanwhile in 1995 they were just as hungry after returning to touring following an extended break across the last few album cycles, blowing off the roof with the new riff-tastic new songs and louder rock versions of the quiet acoustic songs they had blasted off to the stratosphere with in the early 1990s (the funk rock "Drive" is legendary). Each disc contains at least a few unique deep cuts as well, some of which are brand new to the R.E.M. live recording back catalogue overall. 

It's all really good if you think about it logically, really: great songs, great band, great performances. So necking points out of this feels downright performative, but even considering its sheer size it doesn't give me quite the same rush as some of the other R.E.M. live records I've rated higher. R.E.M. at the BBC doesn't have a particular angle beyond being an absolute metric ton of BBC recordings, so nine times out of ten when I'm in a live album mood for this band I'd end up reaching out for the more unique and stylised sets that have been released separately before, simply because they feel more tailored for specific moods and mindsets and that's just what my preference with live albums is. And yet, it's hard to fault any of the sets too much and I thoroughly enjoy them when they're on. So... a neat 7/10, good but not great, depends on the mood kind of score? Sure. But with no disrespect to the work ethos Messiers Berry, Buck, Mills and Stipe.

Just never binge this though or you'll really get sick of "Man on the Moon" in a way that you never, ever thought was possible.

Rating: 7/10

Physical corner: The box this is stored in is your 'typical' CD boxset: thick square box housed in a sturdy slipcase. The big booklet goes through some of the general background for each of the concerts and has a number of interviews from big name BBC DJs. It's nothing extravagant - functional at best perhaps - but it's got that solid feel-good physical aspect of a decent box set. The paper fold over the slipcase is a bit flimsy though, it's been barely glued on and one of these days I just know it's going to get ripped.

The Shins - Port of Morrow (2012)

1) The Rifle's Spiral; 2) Simple Song; 3) It's Only Life; 4) Bait and Switch; 5) September; 6) No Way Down; 7) For a Fool; 8) Fall of '82; 9) 40 Mark Strasse; 10) Port of Morrow

The Shins reborn as a studio project for Mercer, and hints of something spicier get muddled by an awkwardly safe professionalism elsewhere.

Key tracks: "The Rifle's Spiral", "No Way Down", "Port of Morrow"

The Shins started out as James Mercer's solo project: it only became a band when he convinced his bandmates from Flake Music to be his back-up musicians for the solo songs he had written and which were gaining considerable traction. While their debut had a largely acoustic sound, The Shins never particularly sounded like they weren’t a 'proper' band either to my ears - which means that I was one of the people who got caught by surprise when Mercer embraced the idea that The Shins was his project and he unceremoniously (and a little sheepishly) fired the rest of the band a few years after Wincing the Night Away. Port of Morrow is a turning point for The Shins as an entity, as Mercer teaming up with Danger Mouse in Broken Bells and the Sparklehorse collaboration record Dark Night of the Soul in the interim years inspired him to treat his main project the same way: hiring guns as the songs saw fit, collaborating without fixing people in place and tweaking the material in studio as long as his whims demanded.

Port of Morrow is still clearly in lineage with the first three albums given how unmistakable Mercer's voice and personality is, but it is undoubtedly a major change. The expanded instrumentation of Wincing the Night Away hinted at Mercer’s growing ambitions and now on his own he’s turned towards a full-blown studio experience, with a hi-fi and high-detail sound dominating the album and a star-studded cast list supporting him. Besider Mercer himself and the supervising superstar producer Greg Kurstin who play most of the parts on the album, Port of Morrow's credits roll is a list of names familiar to anyone who’s paid attention to indie rock liner notes in the 2000s: Sleater Kinney member and session drummer favourite Janet Weiss, Modest Mouse drummer Joe Plummer and Conor Oberst collaborators Nik Freitas and Nate Walcott feature among others, and even the ex-Shins members Dave Hernandez and Martin Crandall appear across the album. Mercer's changed attitude of utilising the right talent he wants in the exact section he needs it in is reflected in the credits list, and everything about Port of Morrow is equally pitch perfectly executed and micromanaged. The homegrown, grassroots sound of the first three albums is long gone, and in their place is a distinctly, and slightly disjointedly, professional approach.

I'm normally not one to criticise this kind of sound - I typically obsess over these studio-as-instrument records - but sometimes things go a little overboard even for my tastes. When even the stripped down acoustic palate cleanser "September" sounds so busy with everything that's happening in the background that it's just as loaded with elements as anything else on the record, you know the sound might be a little too engineered. The magic with albums like these - when they work - is that each detail matters and is clearly audible, even if you need headphones for it. Port of Morrow, in comparison, sounds stuffed and overproduced, which is a word I don't wave around lightly. There's a lot of clean and quite honestly sterile sheen all over the place either hiding countless instrumental details that turn out to contribute to surprisingly little or loading up elements that only serve to clutter the sound, such as the thoroughly unnecessary synth squelches all over the chorus of "Fall of '82". I’m not entirely sure Greg Kurstin - most famous for Adele, Sia, Kelly Clarkson et al - has really been the right fit for Mercer’s tone or songwriting, and his touch often feels at odds at wanting something punchier out of Mercer’s gentle indie pop hand.

That strange kind of professional po-faced attitude is present across the album including the actual songs: everything’s very grown up and even when some of the whimsy of yesteryear does appear, like in the bubbly platformer game jungle level music of "Bait and Switch", it doesn't sound natural - but that could just be the heavy-handed production talking. They're still Shins songs but in fitted business suits and cosy office jobs, fit for big budget coming of age film soundtracks and smooth radios: listen to "It's Only Life" and "For a Fool" to hear what I mean, both middle-of-the-road ballads that lend the impression of Mercer and Kurstin's song selection process resembling a curated audience test for maximum easy likability (though, granted, I have a small genuine soft spot for "For a Fool" because I've played it so much on Rocksmith after picking up bass again). It’d be easy to blame Kurstin here but I think at least half the blame is on Mercer himself, who’s still adept at delightful and catchy melodies but he rarely bats for anything exciting across the record and rather seems to play it safe. “Simple Song” is a good example, because it’s such a rush with its big booming drums and a lush chorus to die for with an instant-hook vocal melody to boot; it’s impossible not to love it at least a little. But at some point you start wondering whether you enjoy “Simple Song” in itself, or if you enjoy it because it’s so eerily close to a more top 40 ready version of “Phantom Limb” off the last album. “Simple Song” is Mercer repeating the incredible lead single of his last record but cutting together a flashier edit of it, and it works because of course it does. But it's a bit clinical.

But I'm still a sucker for Mercer's melodies and for the most part, that's enough to keep me enjoying Port of Morrow to the extent that every once in a blue moon it gets a spin in the player. It’s not a particularly thrilling record, but there aren't really that many real flubs in the tracklist either and mostly it's a pleasant romp through some overproduced pop jingles, where some parts captivate as much as others are on autopilot. Fortunately the former outweigh the latter to some extent and occasionally there's genuine delight, such as the sunny and warm "No Way Down" that's a momentary freedom from the album's heavyhandedness. There’s also two absolute knockouts with "The Rifle's Spiral" and "Port of Morrow", both of which take advantage of the laborious studio environment and make a strong positive showcase for Mercer’s new approach. "The Rifle's Spiral" is a real journey despite its three and half minute length, with Weiss conjuring a hypnotic drum shuffle that propels the song's disjointed guitars and hectic synth noise into dramatic ebbs and flows - and yet it still functions like an indie pop singalong, just something more surreal and unhinged. The title track meanwhile drowns itself in atmospheric keyboards, letting Mercer's falsetto swim beside the genuinely lovely arrangement and evocative melody. Neither song sounds like anything ever done under The Shins moniker and yet they work perfectly as part of that continuum, and they do their job selling the new concept. They sound like the kind of brave new start that Mercer was seemingly aiming for by relaunching his project; it's a shame then that outside those songs he often plays things curiously safe.

Rating: 6/10

Various Artists - Help!: A Day in the Life (2005)

1) Coldplay - How You See the World No. 2; 2) Razorlight - Kirby's House; 3) Radiohead - I Want None of This; 4) Keane & Faultline - Goodbye Yellow Brick Road; 5) Emmanuel Jal - Gua; 6) Gorillaz - Hong Kong; 7) Manic Street Preachers - Leviathan; 8) The Kaiser Chiefs - I Heard It Through the Grapevine; 9) Damien Rice - Cross-Eyed Bear; 10) The Magic Numbers - Gone Are the Days; 11) Tinariwen - Cler Achel; 12) The Coral - It Was Nothing; 13) Mylo - Mars Needs Women; 14) Maximo Park - Wasteland; 15) Elbow - Snowball; 16) Bloc Party - The Present; 17) Hard-Fi - Help Me Please; 18) The Go! Team - Phantom Broadcast; 19) Babyshambles - From Bollywood to Battersea; 20) George & Antony - Happy Christmas, War Is Over

A charity album turned scene compilation, mid-00s UK in a thrilling nutshell.

Key tracks: "Leviathan" (Manic Street Preachers), "Gone Are the Days" (The Magic Numbers), "Kirby's House" (Razorlight)

War Child - a UK-based charity established to aid children in war-torn regions - at one point in time realised that charity music compilations are an excellent way to raise funds for good causes, especially if you actually give the artists free reins rather than go for jolly charity singles. 1995 saw the release of War Child's first collection The Help Album, and since then the charity have been periodically releasing collections of brand new music to raise awareness and money, focusing on the current and contemporary artists of the given year the release comes out, each of whom contribute something new and unheard - whatever they want.

Because of the way they come about, War Child albums have inadvertently become snapshots of the British music scene of whichever time period one gets released in. The Help Album united the biggest names in and around Britpop as well the nascent threads of pre-millennium anxiety that was about to take over, becoming one of the decade's definitive various artist compilations if you're in any way that taste inclined. In 2005, on the tenth anniversary of the original release, the official sequel Help!: A Day in the Life acted as a similar definition of where British music was in the mid-00s: the rise of the new art rock scene, the oversaturation of landfill indie, the masters of yore exploring new paths and the mashing of other sounds and genres into the traditionally British songwriting, represented here through the twenty songs. Besides the returning veterans (Radiohead, Manic Street Preachers, Damon Albarn by way of Gorillaz) and the few then-upcoming future stars (Bloc Party, Elbow, The Go! Team), looking at the tracklist is a right blast in the past, glowing with names that at one point in time meant something but now have been lost completely in time: The Magic Numbers, Mylo, The Coral, etc, etc. If you want to know what music in the UK sounded like in 2005, Help!: A Day in the Life is practically a Nuggets compilation.

Each War Child selection comes with a gimmick and the one for Help! was that each song was recorded, produced and released within the same 24 hours, taking advantage of the growing digital download market (the CD arrived a little later). Given the circumstances, it's really surprising just how much effort nearly everyone involved has put in - maybe realising that going for zero effort in a charity compilation probably isn't cool, not that it stopped Babyshambles whose "From Bollywood to Battersea" is exactly the kind of "pub's closing in five, let's call it a day" garbage they were synonymous with (why we ever as a species thought Pete Doherty should have a record deal, I've no idea). Coldplay recycle a prior Japanese bonus track off X&Y and call it 'No.2' (though the differences are so minor I can't even detect them), but at least it's a good song, and Chris Martin sounds downright angry at one point in it which is a surprising turn of events. A number of artists also turn in covers, which isn't too unexpected: The Kaiser Chiefs turn "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" into a laddy pub disco anthem (shudder), Keane's "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" sounds like a Keane song, and Boy George and Anohni dueting on John Lennon's "Happy Xmas" is some kind of a LGBT fever dream that strangely works, Ending the album on a Christmas song (and let's remember this was released in autumn originally) is a bit off-kilter and out of everything on the record it screams "charity album" the most, but there's sincerity and warmth in the makeshift duo's performance that closes the record in an unexpectedly poignant way.

It's the original material that keeps me coming back to this record though. The artists I already knew and loved are in strong form, with Manics previewing their imminent return to guitar riffs with the fiery and frivolent (those handclaps!) "Leviathan", Elbow's "Snowball" is full of barely restrained anger as Guy Garvey fantasises over the ghosts of war-killed innocents coming back to haunt Tony Blair over a deceptively pretty melody which by the end has morphed into a villain song, The Go! Team's "Phantom Broadcast" is a delightful Bollywood spaghetti Western theme, and the contemplative "Hong Kong" is one of my favourite Gorillaz songs and absolutely worth looking up for anyone who enjoys Demon Days. I don't think anyone else in Radiohead but Yorke ever even knew "I Want None of This" existed and it's certainly no "Lucky" (their original The Help Album contribution), but Yorke mashing his piano hauntingly is always engaging to at least some degree. Meanwhile the "forgotten" artists remind why they did inspire budding fanbases in one point in time - The Magic Numbers have always left me a little cold but "Gone Are the Days" genuinely makes me wish I'd love them because it's such a jubilantly lovely summer number, and Mylo's "Mars Needs Women" is a fun slice of mid-00s hipster house. Even the pub rock acts I could barely stomach back in the day cause me to question my 2000s self, courtesy Razorlight's "Kirby's House" and Hard-Fi's "Help Me Please" - both more engaging and inspired than anything else I've ever heard from the two acts, as if the mere presence of the more esteemed peers pushed them further (both acts also re-recorded these songs for their follow-up albums, which means even they were impressed by the tracks).

Not all here is gold and that's just the nature of twenty-track various artists compilations, and the slightly less exciting cuts most of the time pick up enough power through their peers that they work in the flow, next to a lot of great music from acts that may not have crossed your mind for eons. The thing is, I bought this for pennies for the sole purpose of nabbing a few non-album tracks off artists I like and yet it's turned out to be something very different: a rock solid scene compilation. The 2000s were when I really took off as a music fan and my attention was very heavily focused in the British music media and independent scene; Help!: A Day in the Life brings me right back to that time period, of online fanzines and forums, of hype machine going up and down on each new act. It was a genuinely exciting and fertile period for British music, and the wild and varied sounds and accents of this compilation represents it incredibly well.

Rating: 8/10

The Shins - Wincing the Night Away (2007)

1) Sleeping Lessons; 2) Australia; 3) Pam Berry; 4) Phantom Limb; 5) Sealegs; 6) Red Rabbits; 7) Turn on Me; 8) Black Wave; 9) Spilt Needles; 10) Girl Sailor; 11) A Comet Appears

The Shins expand their sound and give more space for their signature melodies to grow in. This is what they had been building for and now it's here and it's wonderful.

Key tracks: "Phantom Limb", "Turn on Me", "A Comet Appears"

The bubbling synths that open "Sleeping Lessons" are forever ingrained in my head. It was the first song - I think - I heard from The Shins, when the reviews for Wincing the Night Away were doing rounds and one of them helpfully contained a link to the song; for whatever reason that opening brings that era of my life into my mind so tightly, more than anything else on this record. The whimsically dreamy start to the song is a fun red herring though, because shortly after the song explodes into one of The Shins' most rollicking, hectic bangers. The song grows into full bloom, and listened to in retrospect after I had become familiar with The Shins' other albums, the band themselves did the same on Wincing the Night Away.

The longest ever running joke with The Shins is how they're going to CHANGE YOUR LIFE and it's so, so boring to repeat at this stage (even though I've referenced it myself, as if bound by law), but hearing "Sleeping Lessons" and then later on the full album really did have an impact, albeit a lesser one. Wincing the Night Away was among the first American indie albums I remember getting really acquainted with after spending most of the 2000s fixated on Britrock and my neighbouring Nordic regions, and it was a breath of brand new air in its whimsy, splendour and lushness. As much as it's a time capsule for me (a good half the album's worth of songs bring back some really vivid memories of certain places I happened to hear them in), the truth is it's only gotten better with age, even if perhaps unfairly so as I now get to compare it to other Shins albums. In 2021 as I write this, I own all The Shins albums that have been released so far and that's solely thanks to this album; and even if most of those records have been diminishing returns or have only carried brief glimpses of what I fell in love with here, I keep obediently following Mercer because at one point in his lifetime, he made these ten songs (eleven, if you really want to count "Pam Berry" that's technically a chopped off intro) and that's enough to make me a devotee. 

From a chronological perspective Wincing the Night Away is everything the first two albums ever promised about The Shins, and everything it does is something that they'd be compared to forevermore - it well and truly establishes The Shins, gives them their final form. James Mercer and co are still firmly stood in their old indie pop grounds and the evolutionary line from Oh, Inverted World to here is crystal clear, but on the other hand Mercer's yearning for a more produced, layered sound is starting to gain real territory here. Hence, the instrumentation isn't limited to just twee keyboards and the occasional horn or violin flourish on top of the traditional band quartet set: the credits lists synthesizers, a bouzouki, a dulcimer, MIDI programming and a cat piano (!?), among other instruments. Most of these were also played by Mercer himself, as he's starting to show more explicitly that The Shins were his project through and through, something that he'd declare in all capital letters come next album. Here though, he hits the sweet spot between the two approaches. The songs are lush and vibrant, but they still have that intimate, homegrown feel that was so charming about the first two albums, as well as this one. And besides, every little extra element is there only in service of The Melody.

 
The Melody is the king here. Mercer is incredible and relentless in how he creates the most addictive, hook-heavy melodies both with his voice and instruments, and they all sound perfectly natural and effortless like they just blossomed into existence instead of being meticulously engineered to be weapons of mass affection. Shaking away the basement band aesthetics of the first two albums has only increased his power, because now those melodies are engaged with flourishing, rich arrangements, which act as highlighters and underliners for said melodies. "Phantom Limb" and "Turn on Me" are two of the best songs Mercer's written so far - and honestly probably ever will - and they're deeply layered in a stream of hooks and signature melodies one after another. "Phantom Limb" is even indulgent about it, closing off with a long wordless sing-along of vocal harmonies that's the perfect cherry on top of the song's irresistable run; "Turn on Me" meanwhile doesn't need such tricks to assert its dominance, as that bullseye chorus is more than enough (and the Y-O-U hook is somehow both obvious and ingenius at the same time). The sugar-bouncy "Australia" that constantly tries to one-up itself and the more calm and collected but none less lush "Girl Sailor", placed perfectly in the tracklist to break tension where it's needed, aren't too far behind either. These songs are such a celebration of songcrafts, smarts and arrangement magic, and they're pure joy.

The other added benefit of The Shins expanding their palette for Wincing the Night Away is that for the first time ever they've brought in some real variety, after how both of the first two albums (and particularly Chutes Too Narrow) were perhaps a little one-note. The variety on Wincing the Night Away doesn't mean just some changes in tempo and tone either, as Mercer takes the opportunity to take his posse into brand new waters. In most cases it means a heavier lean on keyboards as a shared lead instrument, like on soft and dreamy "Red Rabbits", but when Wincing the Night Away really lets go of its inhibitions it's a sight to behold. The surreal sway of "Sealegs", driven by its robotic drum machine and off-kilter speak-song vocals, is mind-blowingly different if you arrive here after the first two albums and almost unrecognisable as The Shins even when compared to everything else on this record, but it's a wobbly, woozy delight that subtly knits together the various threads of the album's new ideas under its more extreme guise. To a lesser extent the tightly-wound tension "Spilt Needles" is the same, first locked into a groove lead by a rhythm so sharp it jumps out immediately, before diving into a more familiar territory in its bridge, revealing a soft spot in its armor for a moment. Both "Spilt Needles" and "Sealegs" are still awash with those signature melodies, but they are practically alien in form and it's done exquisitely. 

They're also shifts to a more serious territory. The Shins have spent 90% of their song catalogue so far walking on sunshine from a musical perspective even when Mercer's lyrics were often dripping in surprisingly brutal imagery, but the tone of the songs is coming closer to the lyrics on Wincing the Night Away, even if it's still dominantly a bright indie pop album. "Sealegs" and "Spilt Needles" make the first moves, but the album's sparsest songs lay down on this even heavier, with "Black Wave" matching its title sonically to a staggering decree with its hazy, textural murkiness and "A Comet Appears" closing the album with a scared sigh. "A Comet Appears" is, overall, one of the album's real high points: after so many songs full of wim and energy, its time-worn heart and Mercer's quietly desperate delivery are an emotional stab in the heart, and it's where he utilises that gift of melody like a blade. It's both beautiful and devastating. Where "Sleeping Lessons" revved up the album ready to go in a flash of excitement, "A Comet Appears" is its polar opposite and lays the record's weary head into a long rest with a hint of sadness that it's over. I primarily associate Wincing the Night Away with positive emotions, and that's partly why "A Comet Appears" is so impactful, as it tears the facade away before disappearing into the ether.

All of that - the variety in styles, the emotional complexity, the expanded sound arsenal - is exactly what the first two Shins records needed; and compared to the later records, the production hasn't yet become overbearing. But Wincing the Night Away isn't great because it's The Shins But More! but because it feels like Mercer finally gets to realise his own potential as a songwriter here, and the decision to embellish the sound is what made it possible. The purple prose and lavish praise for the songs above aren't because they just sound great, but because as songs they are such vividly written little masterpieces that hook into your life. "New Slang" on Oh, Inverted World made an impression to everyone who heard it because its central melody felt like it spoke to you (you, directly) from the very second you first heard it and it opened a pathway to your heart you never knew existed. Someone who's written something that great is unlikely to never do so again, but it took until this point for Mercer to repeat the trick and when he finally did, the floodgates opened and he wrote several songs equally as evocative and impressive; I worked my way down the discography backwards from here and it took me a fair long while to really get to grips with the first two albums because there was a stark absence of songs so clearly realised, apart from that one song everyone loved. But there's an abundance of such inspiration and warmth to the songs here that you find yourself swallowed into their dream-like worlds, and that's what makes Wincing the Night Away not just The Shins' best - and most consistent - record, but honestly one of my favourite indie pop records in general. The Shins are a band who probably aren't all that special in the grand scheme of things for me, but who I hold special nonetheless and it's solely because of this.

Rating: 9/10

The Shins - Chutes Too Narrow (2003)

1) Kissing the Lipless; 2) Mine’s Not a High Horse; 3) So Says I; 4) Young Pilgrims; 5) Saint Simon; 6) Fighting in a Sack; 7) Pink Bullets; 8) Turn a Square; 9) Gone for Good; 10) Those to Come

Mercer's posse graduates into a proper band, but struggle with presenting anything that really sticks this time around. All very pleasant though.

Key tracks: "Mine's Not a High Horse", "So Says I", "Young Pilgrims"

Chutes Too Narrow falls in that awkward category of albums where I struggle to think of anything to actually criticize, and yet it still fails to click with me. The early/mid-00s indie sound so wonderfully represented by the album is close to my heart, it retains everything I enjoyed about Oh, Inverted World and appreciate The Shins for in general, and at various points during my lifetime I’ve called James Mercer a melodic genius (sometimes with hyperbole, sometimes dead seriously) and he's up to his usual tricks here too; but no matter how many boxes I check as I go down the list of things I like about the album, this is still the Shins album that’s remained the most distant for me. What am I supposed to make of that?

The Shins are a livelier bunch on this album than on Oh, Inverted World, having graduated from Mercer’s bedroom solo project-come-band into an actual group of sorts, and the more vibrant full band arrangements throughout the record reflect this. There’s fewer cosy acoustic bedroom strums and there's a lot more electric guitars and pep in the backbone: some parts even rock, or at least what passes as rock in The Shins’ world. The best parts of the songs are still Mercer’s vocal melodies which make his unintelligible word salad lyrics come to life as well as the quirky keyboard parts that are all over the record, both of which were also the best parts of Oh, Inverted World and just sound as great when they’re texturing more energetic tracks. Chutes Too Narrow isn’t a million miles away from the debut despite going more electric, but it’s a step towards the more characterised Shins sound that comes to mind when thinking about Mercer's merry bunch.

 

Still, this whole album somehow leaves me largely unaffected about it even if I do enjoy it in purely objective terms. I guess my main issue here is that there aren’t any real stone cold stand-out songs. “Mine’s Not a High Horse” is the closest the album has one, which in its chorus hits that special Mercer zone where the best parts of the album are distilled into one snappy section, the whimsical keyboard melody climbing around Mercer’s voice and the rollicking rhythm. “So Says I” is another standout but I’m honestly hard-pressed to say whether it’s because I genuinely think it’s a great song, or if it sticks simply because its manic pogoing and twee glam rock attitude distinguishes it so much from everything else around it; the whole album is a caffeine shot into the Shins formula and “So Says I” is its most hyper-awake part. Once the pretty acoustic debut throwback “Young Pilgrims” has had its turn, Chutes Too Narrow settles into a comfortable loop of pleasant and perky indie pop ditties that strum, jangle and frolic in a similar manner over and over again - the country twang of “Gone for Good” is about the only time the album pulls a new trick out of its hat - and it shortly comes to a close after the half hour mark. It all passes by a little too quickly and without stirring things too much: itt doesn’t outstay its welcome, and yet after it’s finished it doesn’t feel like it ever really made much of a visit in the first place. Chutes Too Narrow is a little too unassuming for its own good, and not enough of it really springs to life.

The Shins at their best are a genuine joy and at their worst Mercer throws out overwrought treacle and calls it a song, and Chutes Too Narrow falls so squarely in the dead right middle that it doesn’t tick the reaction off in either direction. It's an accomplished record, I'll give it that - I've been enjoying its presence in my rotation in the weeks preceding this review and so it's not like I can really say a bad word about it. But in the group's chronology it’s the phase between the intimacy of Oh, Inverted World and the full bloom of Wincing the Night Away, and both of those albums offer more distinguished (and distinguishable) takes on the ideas presented on Chutes Too Narrow. This is like a little appetiser to give you an idea of what you can expect from The Shins and to pique your interest towards the courses to follow, but you’ll forget it the moment the next dish comes along. 

Rating: 5/10

Lennie Moore - Outcast: Original Soundtrack (1999)

1) Prelude; 2) Daokas; 3) Soldier's Camp; 4) Heaven on Adelpha; 5) World of Marshes; 6) Fatally Wounded; 7) Main Theme; 8) The Ancient Forest World; 9) Watch Out!; 10) Let's Fight!; 11) World of Snow; 12) World of Temples; 13) Main Theme (Reprise); 14) Oriental Spirit; 15) World of Mountains; 16) Orchestra Rehearsal; 17) Ülukai Dance

Sweeping orchestral mountains and valleys, rousing vivid landscapes with extended compositions. A classic soundtrack for a classic game.

 

Key tracks: "Heaven on Adelpha", "World of Snow", "World of Temples"

Outcast is one of those cult classics that by some strange string of fate has ended up becoming something big and meaningful to little old me. It’s always one of the first no-brainer choices when I’m asked to list my all-time favourite games, and its relative obscurity has in some way made it feel even more like it’s something special to me personally. Its grand open-world design, character-driven story beats and epic scale was something very different from my usual video game habits when I encountered it by chance, and its very distinct personality best described as European made it feel incredibly different to anything else that tried to do the same afterwards but always felt they fell short. It’s probably the first game that genuinely drew an emotional reaction out of me when I completed it for the first time. In many ways, it revealed a new aspects to one of my favourite pastimes at the time, and that special magic still remains as I’ve replayed it countless times over the years.

What set Outcast apart from other games at the time is how it presented itself: not just in its graphics with the rather unique voxel-based looks, but in the overall scope of its design. It’s a weird game that dreamt big, and Appeal (the developers) treated it like a special prodigy that could achieve those dreams. A lot of effort and money went into making the game feel that you were in fact witnessing a grand cinematic adventure, and one of the aspects helping to drive that was the soundtrack composed by Lennie Moore and performed by the Moscow Symphony Orchestra and Choir. By today’s standards this isn’t a big deal but an actual orchestrated game soundtrack was absolutely not a thing back in 1999. CD quality audio in games hadn't been around for all that long relatively speaking and so most games aiming for the same style of music went with MIDI strings, and games had only recently started to stretch their wings to the new sonic extents that the evolving technology allowed. This was one of the big promotional points around Outcast as well, with a blurb on the game box advertising it as one of the main features and the orchestra getting credited early on in the movie-like opening credits roll. 

 

 
The orchestral score of Outcast doesn't simply rely on having a big, big sound. The greatest thing about Moore's compositions is that the songs get to live and breathe, ebb and flow. Most of the songs on this soundtrack go for around five minutes, often longer, and not a minute is wasted and only rarely looped. Outcast's big worlds meant players would spend a long time in particular areas and so the songs have been constructed with that in mind, with the multi-minute compositions moving between different moods and variations on their key melodies across their length. Moore went to painstaking lengths to give the game a unified feel across its score while making sure all the various areas had their own flair, and his songs are miniature pieces of art on their own rather than simply backing music. They paint worlds with their movements, particularly the songs dedicated to the key regions of the game. Centerpiece songs such as the pastoral arcs of "World of Temples", the deep-seated melancholy of "World of Snow", the middle-eastern flourishes of the sprawling "Oriental Spirit" and the dramatic slow-builds of "World of Mountains" colour their respective areas with a gripping evocative touch, glueing your attention to the world around you from the moment you step foot into a new area with a new arrangement above it. 

I'm normally not a big fan of orchestral scores, and nine times out of ten they're the epitome of soundtracks that are there to exist and fill space rather than bring something special to the overall experience. The twist is that I think this soundtrack ruined all the others for me. This was the first orchestral game soundtrack I remember hearing and it's such a fantastic score that any other game walking in its footsteps felt like a complete letdown musically. It's still in my opinion among the best soundtracks of its kind, not just in games but across mediums e.g. films (where orchestral scores are, by default, more prominent but also usually even more throwaway). Moore took every advantage he could out of the chance to compose something with a large orchestra in tow and I'm not afraid to say that the results are emotionally stirring for me. Heck, "Heaven on Adelpha" in particular is a vividly beautiful song that can honestly get me a little misty-eyed if caught on a tender moment; it's high up among my favourite video game pieces. 

 

Everything about Outcast's music reflects the game in general so well: it's a labour of love, created by people who truly believed in their art and poured their everything into it to ensure that it was something unique and genuinely special. It's a remarkable soundtrack and among my favourites.

 

And if you're wondering what nicks off one point from the score of one of my favourite games of all time, it's the three combat music pieces where the soundtrack's general building blocks are a little ill-fitting and get stretched a bit too thin for their own good. The combat is probably the game's weakest part, and that applies for the music too.

Rating: 9/10

Kent - Då som nu för alltid (2016)

1) Andromeda; 2) Tennsoldater; 3) Vi är för alltid; 4) Den vänstra stranden; 5) Nattpojken & dagflickan (feat. Anna Ternheim); 6) Vi är inte längre där; 7) Förlåtelsen; 8) Skyll inte ifrån dig; 9) Gigi; 10) Falska profeter; 11) Den sista sången

Kent plan their funeral and finish on an album that doesn't dwell on the end, but rather focuses on delivering one last set of great songs.

Key tracks: "Vi är för alltid", "Falska profeter", "Den sista sången"
Bonus video: The trailer

In March 2016, Kent announced their funeral. The (fantastic) trailer for Då som nu för alltid featured a skeletal drummer marching through familiar iconography from the last three decades - mementos of album covers, music video scenes and logos across the career - and eventually leading a darkly foreboding parade through the deserted streets of Stockholm: the grim reaper visiting moments in history and gathering everyone together for one last time. If it wasn’t clear that something was up from the visuals alone, the stark 1990 ✞ 2016 message at the end of the video made it clear. Last album, last tour, quarter of a century coming to an end. Kent were going to their grave and they were going to celebrate it.

The announcement to call it a day was a shocker, given only two years earlier Kent had released Tigerdrottningen and had showed no signs of slowing down. Still, in retrospect, it's perhaps not coincidental that Tigerdrottningen was the unexpected harbinger of death. It had been the first album in Kent’s long history where it had felt like they were running out of steam, hiding its moments of brilliance underneath a consistent feeling of the once inspiring band operating on autopilot. It wouldn't be too farfetched to think that maybe the band themselves had realised something was amiss too; with Kent always having had a tight control over their journey, the relative non-event of Tigerdrottningen may as well have been a warning sign that the spark wasn’t there anymore. Rather than trying to correct the course, bowing out gracefully after all this time probably seemed like the right idea lest they risked of becoming a band way past their best-by date. 

If you view Då som nu för alltid in that light, it makes a lot more sense on surface level. Despite the theatrics surrounding it (including that hilarious album cover), the album itself is relatively low on the drama and if it is about the end, then it's really subtle about it. Much of the record deals with closure and legacy but mostly in a very specific, character study -like manner that doesn't particularly tie in with the band without a stretch. Instead, Då som nu för alltid sounds like the band is picking things up where they left them the last time like nothing had happened - it’s a direct sequel to Tigerdrottningen, utilising much of its soundworld and aesthetics like it’s just another addition to the back catalogue without any hidden agendas. It’s not exactly what you would expect from a funeral wake and it’s almost bafflingly unconcerned about all that, but on the other hand it’s not like it would make any sense for Kent to back away now from what their sound had evolved to by this point, and when’s the last time you heard an intentional career closing record that experiments or stretches into new directions? The effortless synthesis between electronic programming, synthesizers and a real live rock band was a perfect outfit for Kent and they knew where to go with it and when to emphasise one aspect over another, and Då som nu för alltid flexes that skillset. There aren't too many tweaks from the last album but the sound was never Tigerdrottningen's issue and you could almost say that this second go at it is like Kent wanting to prove they could do justice to the ideas presented on that album.

This isn't a big tearjerking goodbye album; what you mostly have here instead is a really solid, often great album that falls neatly in line with everything else Kent had been doing in the 2010s. The song material is generally top notch, with plenty of peaks and relatively few lows: “Den vänstra stranden” sounds like an excerpt from Tigerdrottningen’s less exciting depths, “Skyll inte ifrån dig" gets buried in the final barrage of songs. There's a duet again, and "Nattpojken & dagflickan" with Anna Ternheim is by a long shot the best duet in Kent's catalogue, smoothly moving close to power ballad territory without actually stepping in it, keeping an element of tension and energy while absorbing the dramatics. The key trait tying the tracks together is that everything sounds grandiose. Every song on Då som nu för alltid is meant to sound at least a little bit epic and something to stir the rumbling emotions within the listener even if they never actually talk about the end directly - each track is a a hand to firmly hold onto during the last journey you'll ever take together, ready to become a lifeline if needed. It's often hopeful and at its heaviest merely bittersweet, but always grand and evocative. When the explosive chorus drums of "Andromeda" colour the stars in the sky in a flash of fireworks and children's choirs, when the extended finale of "Falska profeter" reprises the music played in the album trailer and turns it into a communal huddle moment, when "Vi är inte längre där" grows more and more into a 80s-styled stadium synth showstopper ready to release the stage pyrotechnics with each passing chorus - they all feel larger than life and incredibly important and personal in the moment in time that they inhabit. Even if the album avoids the obvious emotional checkpoints, it still aims to be something resonant and warm with every step and for the most part it succeeds.

The title drop track "Vi är för alltid" is the perfect representation of what Då som nu för alltid aims for, and it serves not as just Kent's last classic single before the end but also as the album's early anchor point for its themes. It's an archetypical Kent pop song the likes of which they had been dropping across the past handful of albums, but it's one that learned lessons along the way and strives to aim higher. To put it simply, it's a banger, a hot badger, it slaps - it’s an alluring verse which grows into a magnificent chorus that sounds even more titanic after it rises from the ashes of the the brief breakdown. There are many others like it on Då som nu för alltid, songs where Kent deliver a hell of a good pop song as they rely on the instincts they had built over the past few, more direct albums - "Tennsoldater"'s electronic twitch and the hard-hitting take-no-prisoners energy of "Förlåtelsen" especially (that final run!) - but none of them feel so vital as "Vi är för alltid". I'm a fan of subtle lyric changes and a special shoutout goes to the shift between its choruses, breakdown and the last chorus that is pure genius in how it hits entirely new emotional reaches with just little tweaks, moving from hopeful ("they will sing songs / make films / write books about us") to defeated ("just kidding, no one is going to sing songs..."), until it eventually morphs into pure desperation ("please make films about us, you must sing songs about us..."), and it sounds so magnificently anthemic the further it trails towards its worries about being forgotten. It's a multifaceted triumph, and the perfect title track (even if indirectly).

But if there is a key song here, it's obviously going to be "Den sista sången" - literally "The Last Song". Like most of the album it slyly dances around the elephant in the room as it describes a transatlantic moment of two destinies moving apart, and it takes it all the way until the very end and the very last lyrics for the subtext to finally become text: "This is the last moment we see / This is the last song I give to you”. As it does, the music swells in that exact wistful, melancholy yet beautiful manner that is how in your heart you always wanted this journey to end. There's that cliché about not being sad that it's over but glad that it happened, and that exact emotional note is what "Den sista sången" nails down, carrying a blue haze throughout its calm guitar riff, the inexplicably English-language middle-eight where the children's choir and echoing drums from "Andromeda" make their longing return back to earth and the appropriately sizeable finale that stays just short of becoming the kind of an epic ending that the song felt like it was building up towards. And I'm not going to lie, I would have loved for it to have had the big waterworks credits roll that the occasion calls for and the abrupt end feels downright cheeky: the last wink from the band, stubbornly making their own way as they always have done and denying even the smallest bit of obvious fan service. But I've made my peace with it and if anything, the swift closure brings, well, closure. It doesn't linger on, this chapter has finished and life moves on. It hits a different kind of emotional beat. "Den sista sången" is brilliant, and the perfect song to end a career with.

And then it's over, the funeral march has finished, but Då som nu för alltid barely lets that little fact define it as an album. I still don't really know which way I swing here - the sentimental side of me would have loved an album that milked the hell out of everything coming to an end, but not doing so and largely presenting itself as just an album among others has in some ways let it build a life beyond that reputation. It's easier to pick it up for a listen and simply treat it as the great album it is without that extra emotional weight behind it. There was always going to be bias around this album by way of simply knowing it is the end and that the band deliberately considered it as such, but by letting these songs breathe outside that context ensures the listener hears them primarily on their musical merits, and it's a great album just on that basis alone. Not within Kent's top tier perhaps, but a steadily consistent example of their talents in songwriting, arrangement and performance. For their last album, Kent decided to simply showcase the reasons they endured for 26 years and with which they built a grand discography worth exploring, focusing on delivering one last set of excellent songs over dwelling on their own funeral. It results in an album that stands up to the old highlights, and it’s something they can proudly close their story with.

Rating: 8/10

Kent - Tigerdröttningen (2014)

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.

Rating: 6/10

Kent - Jag är inte rädd för mörkret (2012)

1) 999; 2) Petroleum; 3) Isis & Bast: 4) Jag ser dig; 5) Tänd på; 6) Beredd på allt; 7) Ruta 1; 8) Färger på natten; 9) Låt dom komma; 10) Hänsyn

Kent fully embrace radio-friendly hit songs after years of avoiding them. Big songs for stadium audiences, though all cut from the same cloth.

Key tracks: "999", "Petroleum", "Jag ser dig"

As referenced in my other Kent reviews, and for the benefit of the non-Nordic audience out there, Kent were a big thing. They had the much-quoted reputation of being Sweden’s biggest band during their prime and their impact around the rest of the Nordic region wasn't too shabby either, and that success had come in completely organic terms. The band simply had the luck to make songs which resonated with people, that success provided them with the autonomy to take their career wherever they wanted, and people’s tastes just happened to follow along no matter the style or sound changes, even when Kent themselves liked to act hesitant about embracing their public status (minimal interviews, no traditional compilations, etc). They were a stadium band with stadium hits but it was completely accidental and prior to 2012, the band had been pushing themselves in directions that could have easily seen them get thrown back in the shadows. Jag är inte rädd för mörkret, then, is practically an acknowledgment of their status. It's an honest arena album with an accessibly melodic and hook-driven sound, it's outwardly positive and it dials down the murky electronic aesthetics of the preceding albums in favour of a booming, once again more band-centric sound. It's something you would normally imagine a band of Kent's stature sound like by this point in their career.

Joakim Berg might still be covering familiarly anxiety-driven Kent ground lyrically but the songs on Jag är inte rädd för mörkret hide their meanings behind their upbeat summer radio hit direction. 2010's En plats i solen was already hinting at this and in a lot of ways Jag är inte rädd för mörkret is a decided extension of those initial steps, with the same producer Stefan Boman in tow as well: everything sounds clear as crystal and bright like a holiday afternoon. As a fan of all those dark and insular records before this, my natural instinct should probably be to balk at this - but my simple brain is wont to find pleasure in big anthemic choruses just as much as anyone else's, and the fact is that Kent is simply really good at those. The songs on Jag är inte rädd för mörkret do not showcase anything new or unique, and they tiptoe in a kind of Absolute Radio territory to a perhaps dangerous degree, but songs such as "Jag ser dig", "Tänd på", Färger på natten" and "Låt dom komma" are a positive rush, precisely because they aim straight for the jugular. There is strength to a hecking good chorus and Kent are so proud of the ones on Jag är inte rädd för mörkret that many of the songs conclude with an extended repetition of their big central hook, simple and short enough to sing along even if you're not native to the language. They're the type of choruses that you get a little obsessed about as they continue playing in your head: in particular the uninhibited U2-stadium bombast of "Jag ser dig" (the best of this lot in its shameless fist-pump/sing-along theatrics) and the nearly camp and endlessly crowd-pleasing "Låt dom komma" are tracks that shine in this department, quickly pushing away everything that isn’t their chorus. But they are, absolutely, really great choruses.

 

Really, my complaint here isn't the direction itself because there's so many good and positively instant cuts across Jag är inte rädd för mörkret, but rather that it sticks so strongly to its one chosen element that after a while it all gets rather one note: by halfway point you know exactly where each song is going, because outside minor variation they all share the same structure and flow. It isn't until all the way to the very end that you get something a little different, when the somewhat abruptly moody, loop-driven closer "Hänsyn" ironically sticks out a bit too much, as a washed out rendition of the style the prior albums rode on. As good as the songs are, much of the album's material feels interchangeable with one another, and only a few songs really make a stand on their own merits. That notion is heightened further by how Jag är inte rädd för mörkret sticks its best - and most diverse - songs right in the beginning. "999" is a radio-friendly version of Du & jag döden's landmark finale "Mannen i den vita hatten": across its seven minutes of epic rock bombast and Berg's stream-of-consciousness style introspective ranting, it flips the usual Kent formula of ending an album with a slowly unfolding giant by starting with one and kicking straight into full speed. It's by and far the most "traditional" Kent has sounded in ages, but by way of an old master showing off why he became a legend in the first place. "Petroleum" leans towards the other extreme and more heavily against Kent's more contemporary electronic sound, but it twists it to sound brighter than before, like a dangerously sharp synth pop club hit. It's the most alluring song across the entire record, sinking deeper into its swirl of a chorus and enchantingly detached delivery, somewhat challenging the album's openly warm nature by taking its aesthetics and still moving inwards.

Perhaps the surprise here is that my reaction to the album isn't stronger. Jag är inte rädd för mörkret has such a strong personality and it's such a 180 degree turn from where Kent had been trawling since the mid-2000s that, like similar more audience-friendly endeavours in other artists' catalogues, it would be an obvious candidate for being an album you'd either love or leave behind. That it ends up somewhere in the middle - as a good album that’s neither too exciting or disappointing - can be attributed to its small flaws: how most of it is effectively multiple variations on the same song, and how in a tight 10-song run a few substandard songs ("Hänsyn", the indifferent slog of "Isis & Bast") stand out more than the consistently enjoyable bulk of the record. Part an olive branch to the wider audiences and part letting one’s hair down after a string of heavily conceptual, tightly-knit records, Jag är inte rädd för mörkret is a more interesting album by its nature than perhaps by its songs - my review for this album is shorter than my average Kent review simply because there’s less in these songs to talk about due to their very design. But its charm is in simple pleasures: the beauty of big pop songs delivered by a band who confidently know their way around them.

Rating: 7/10

Kent - En plats i solen (2010)

1) Glasäpplen; 2) Ismael; 3) Skisser för sommaren; 4) Ärlighet respekt kärlek; 5) Varje gång du möter min blick; 6) Ensam lång väg hem; 7) Team Building; 8) Gamla Ullevi; 9) Minimalen; 10) Passagerare

No plan or greater concept, just a casually put together set of ten songs with bright sounds. 

Key tracks: "Skisser för sommaren", "Ärlighet respekt kärlek", "Gamla Ullevi"

En plats i solen was released roughly seven months after Röd, with nary a warning or an accompanying fanfare. One day you just had two new songs available online with an announcement that an album would arrive in a week's time, and that's it. Behind the scenes, Kent had been feeling particularly inspired and the band thought to strike while the iron's hot rather than hold off until a full new album cycle, and the intention was to get the new songs they had been writing out while they were still new to the band as well - the album was reportedly finished the very month it was announced to the public. After a series of heavily thematic, cohesively put together records En plats i solen was an intentional break from such affairs - a holiday per the name (“A Place in the Sun”) - by way of simply knocking out some songs together and releasing them out in the wild.

With quick successor albums like En plats i solen you often find yourself viewing them as the b-sides collections for the preceding albums, and there is some truth to that here too as some of the songs were leftovers from the Röd sessions (though I'd be hard pressed to say which, with "Minimalen" being my most obvious guess). That said, viewed in retrospect, En plats i solen is far better described as the first glimpse of Kent's next phase. The electronic soundscape of Röd was here to stay but following its tour, a live band dynamic had started to creep back into the fray to act as the undercurrent pulling the synthesizer textures together and, perhaps coincidentally, the suave gloom around the last few albums had started to move to the side. Next year's follow-up album Jag är inte rädd för mörkret would be the conclusion to the change Kent was undertaking as it would engorge itself in bright and optimistic songs rich in melody, and En plats i solen leans a lot more towards that end goal than it does in Röd's direction, though it's still in the middle of pulling its other foot slowly away from its direct predecessor's shadow. It's a snapshot of the route Kent took from the darkness of Röd towards the sunlight of what was to come. 

The ten songs on En plats i solen are unrelated and without a greater concept or plan, and they are more extroverted and openly audience-friendly than Kent had been for a long while, going some way to bridge the gap between the popular rock hits of their past with the guidelines the band was operating on in the present day. They understandable carry lesser stakes, and that’s both a blessing and a curse. All the songs are forced to live on their own merits and for Kent that means going all-in on the hook department, which is extremely entertaining. Their strong melody game had never gone on hold but since Du & jag döden the band had began to treat albums as singular entities where all parts supported one another - now it's each song for itself, and that means Kent let them all explode as big as they can. But, the quick writing and recording process also means that some of the quality control from the previous album runs has loosened up and for the first time in recent memory, there’s a clear gap between the album at its strongest and and weakest, now without a stronger context to perhaps give the slightly lesser songs some non-musical meaning. And there's a number of them. "Varje gång du möter min blick" buries a great chorus with largely meandering verses, “Ensam lång väg hem” has some nifty sonic details but its repetition-heavy build doesn’t work as interestingly as it could, the bouncy synth pop cut “Ismael” used to be a favourite of mine but now sounds like the first draft of future Kent songs in its vein (I still like it - just that I like its successors more) and most damningly, I’ve owned this record since release and I still can’t remember how “Team Building” sounds off the top of my head. If you were to disparage this album as way to cash out on some quick outtakes and leftovers, there’s definitely material here to base that assumption on.

There is a night and day difference though between the more middling moments and the rest. The common thread throughout the album of Kent tackling more hit-oriented material, as if as a way to make up for the more esoteric singles of the previous albums and to throw some good ol’ crowd pleasers out, unexpectedly results in uniformly great songs. The synth fireworks and whistle hooks of "Gamla Ullevi" find Kent interpreting 2010s EDM choruses in their own language, the album stand-out “Skisser för sommaren” makes a crowd-begging la-la-la chorus sound fresh and euphoric (a special mention goes how wonderfully the song picks itself back up after its freak-out breakdown, right back into that undefeatable chorus),  the mournful and steadfast "Ärlighet respekt kärlek" shows just how great the band are at stadium-sized torchsong ballads when they're in the mood for one, and “Glasäpplen” utilises disco strings and beats over its emotionally detached delivery with such suave and charm as if it invented them. The album-focused orientation of the past few albums was one of the reasons they make up Kent’s golden period, but it’s actually refreshing to hear the band knock out a number of songs that are effortlessly, refreshingly open and welcoming - in part because they are so excellent at it. It’s the same strength that Vapen & ammunition held with its singles-or-bust approach, but this time the band are less self-aware about it which makes it, in some way, a little more honest and warm.

As far as the rest go, it’s enjoyable standard-tier Kent. The skittering electro of “Minimalen” nods towards Röd the most and it's a welcome change of pace towards the end of the album, and towards the weary prettiness and powerful duet vocals of “Passagerare” which closes the record with a yearning sigh. The album has a slight lean towards being frontloaded but it finishes cosily and comfortably, even if a little unspectacularly. And as it ends, no moment of reflection of what you’ve just listened to ever comes to pass, or any real lingering notion for that matter. I feel bad for saying this - because I do really like En plats i solen - but it’s an album I sometimes forget about, as it's sandwiched between two bigger personalities to the point that its appearance in the chronology is often accompanied by an “oh, that’s right” level of realising it’s there. En plats i solen is - for better or worse - a set of ten songs by Kent, some great and some less so, written and captured on tape as the band was coming off their creative imperial phase. After a discography of albums where each record has had a purpose to play in the story, En plats i solen feels slightly underwhelming as an album that "just" exists. A good album, as I’ve said - but one that is primarily a palate cleanser rather than a notable independent entry.

Rating: 7/10