The Singles Jukebox

Swedish rock of which we kind of approve!

[Video][Website]
[6.00]

Alfred Soto: The guitars chug with the right pitch on this Swedish band’s single; the peals that echo the chorus are reminiscent of bits in late ’90s rock radio tunes by the Wallflowers. Memorable now, I suppose, for those on a nostalgia trip.
[6]

Cassy Gress: They say it themselves: “a monotone verse needs a strong chorus.” This has a stronger chorus than the more hushed verses, but I’m not sure I’d actually call it strong. It feels like an anthem as a going-away present; this is Kent’s last album and last tour, and I can hear this chorus maybe being sung at protests or marches. The trouble with this kind of song though is when it tries to pull the heartstrings a bit too hard; the pause after the first “one foot in the grave, among lilacs and students” is effective, but the second time it just feels tacky.
[5]

Iain Mew: Is it just me or is the tentative opening riff vaguely Calvin Harris? It doesn’t proceed along those lines in sound, unsurprisingly, but there is a certain similarity in the functional application of template. There’s a conviction here that there’s no problem with making the most obvious soft rock anthem ever is as long as you do everything within it well enough. They’re not totally wrong.
[6]

Will Adams: I go back and forth with the processing on “Egoist.” On one hand, the perfect quantization makes the song run like clockwork. On the other, the vocal layers are stacked like bricks. That chorus would soar in any medium, though, so I’ll award another point.
[6]

Brad Shoup: Sturdy pop-rock whose ascents and descents are as predictable as breathing. I kinda want to hear this with an impolite slathering of Auto Tune.
[5]

Edward Okulicz: I’ve been a fan of Kent for 15 years or so now, but it took this song sounding eerily in places like “With or Without You” (you can sing parts of the verses of that over this and it scans perfectly) for the realisation that they’ve gradually become Sweden’s U2 to finally dawn. The crisp sound makes it easy for me to overlook how beige and vacuous the attempts at anthemics are, and the charge of that chorus recalls perhaps their best, most immediate single (the stiff-limbed disco rock of 2000’s “Music Non Stop”), but the tone and tenor are more like previous album’s “La Belle Epoque.” As more of their singles have a rage that’s directed outward rather than focusing on the personal or interpersonal, it’s harder to grasp onto something that transcends my nascent understanding of the language and ignorance of the context, yet I still find much to enjoy in Kent’s well-crafted, consistent pop-rock.
[8]