31st... An unknown marvel

Jet. Five stars.

Katell Keineg is amongst the greatest artists I've heard. I now imagine you saying "who? Never heard of her." Such is life. How to describe her? Imagine an Irish folkie with the vocal texture of Nick Drake and a predilection for epic rock, add excellent, slightly obscure lyrics and the capacity to render complicated emotions in the space of sometimes very short songs, and you start to get the gist.

There are two drawbacks to Katell. One: her CDs come out once in a blue moon. Two: her CDs are overstuffed. Jet is 60 minutes, which gets to be a long time with a pair of Professional Sony Dynamic Stereo Headphones clamped over your ears....

The Battle of the Trees is one of the epic tracks and one of the most inscrutable. What starts as a simple guitar and voice morphs into a full band ensemble with a somewhat unorthodox choice of instrumentation and several quick changes of direction.

One Hell of a Life is far more catchy, a pop song and a half (great single in the making here). It's an upbeat epitaph before-the-fact, a perfect vision of a life well lived.

Smile continues in a clear, spacious style with the mix of acoustic building into electric making it soar. There is also a mix of happiness, weariness and content which keeps me coming back to it just as much as the attention grabbing chorus.

It dissolves, slipping into Enzo '96, a very simple story told in haunting drone. Katell draws her voice out in a manner that reminds me of ancient world polyphony and Nico. Rather amazing.

Ole, Conquistador is drawn from Jose Marti, the Latin American poet. Another excellent song, aided by exquisitely mannered (and unorthodox) instrumentation and of course, Katell's voice, expressing everything in a fittingly poetic context.

Leonor is my least favorite. Highly experimental, based on an epitaph for Leonor Fini, the surrealist. Problem one: it sings like prose. The verses, or rather paragraphs, have no melodic value at all and the chorus grows repetitive. It does tell you all about the bizarre life of that particular Modernist.

Veni Vidi Vici is light, with a beautiful melodic line, but it does have the sound of filler. Too many choruses.

The record gets back into its stride with Venus, the monologue of a woman traveling to Illinois on the night train. Very spare, and her flat, tired voice, almost not singing anymore, is riveting. What is this woman trying to get away from? And what is dancing a metaphor to? Is it a metaphor? Jet's darkest song presents nothing but mystery.

Mother's Map is the sinister epic, equivalent to Battle of the Trees dark twin. The switchbacks are even more pronounced, and the percussion in the quiet, and the violins in the loud, form perfect accents to the struggle of a young woman negotiating life. Punkish intensity in the crescendo, then a heartbreaking coda with just an acoustic guitar to accompany her.

Marietta has world music vibes to start and end. "Marietta, queen of pancakes/crawled out of the Bisquick mix/with nothing but her wishes," as Katell whispers in deadpan. Vividly set on the seashore (a recurring setting, the album's theme, as it were), once it gets past the scene-setter and into the song, it loses a bit of edge. However, there is still mystery. Who are these people? Reality? Metaphor?

Hoping and Praying is a home recording, a strange and pagan interlude. Multi-tracked voice, hand claps for percussion and what sure sounds like a banjo with only one string left. It's like she add-libbed it out in the fishing shack one afternoon. Odd, but it adds colour.

The album ends with There You Go, a love song equal in complexity to any of the other songs, yet also breathtaking in its simplicity. "All things said and done/I love you, darling/Is that enough?" Who can really say it better than that?

In the end, even the title, Jet, is hard to fathom, since there would seem no obvious connotation for it. Challenging it may be, but get hold of it. This woman is a treasure. If you want a darker, smokier affair, try O Seasons O Castles. She also has two more recent CDs (this one's 1997, after all) that I will try to get hold of. I hope this review has captured some measure of her uniqueness.