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Choose from the following articles:
npr.org 1.10.07 - "A Long Career on the Brink of Fame".
New York Times 7.2.06 - A feature article about Katell in The New York Times Magazine.
Hot Press 11.25.04
Rolling Stone 11.09.02
Sorted 10.11.02
Esquire 9.99
Musician 8.97
Los Angeles Times 7.27.97
Newsweek 6.30.97
The Atlanta Journal and Constitution 6.26.97
Entertainment Weekly 6.20.97
Mojo 10.94
New York Magazine 10.3.94
Irish Times 7.30.94
Hot Press 11.25.04
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Rolling Stone 11.09.02
Review of What's the Only Thing Worse Than the End of Time?
There's a theory that certain musical frequencies affect people emotionally. Katell Keineg has found them. It's damn near impossible to listen to her earthy and ethereal voice without feeling the spirit move you. The Franco-Welsh (she sings in English, but old-world Europe oozes from her throaty croon and gracefully gangly limbs) singer/songwriter's latest effort, the EP What's the Only Thing Worse Than the End of Time?, is a brief testament to her power to permeate. The standouts are a chilling live version of Nick Drake's "River Man" (Keineg is especially powerful onstage) and the celebratory "Beautiful Day," which sounds like a chance meeting between a Sixties-pop melody line and a white girl on a Caribbean island. What's the Only Thing seems to embody both of those worlds, suggesting that Keineg's travels over the past five years, during which she was AWOL from the studio, helped her find a balance between her poetic roots and pop sensibility. If What's the Only Thing is any indication of what is to come from Keineg, prepare to be seriously hooked by her frequencies.
- Robin Aigner
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Sorted 10.11.02
Katell Keineg, Whelans, Dublin, 11th October 2002
Whelans, despite its bohemian charms, is not the ideal place to hold this kind of a gig. First of all, it's too small. Katell Keineg has been a regular fixture on the Dublin live circuit for some time now and has gained a significant fan base. Whelans' organisers have done their best by organising two gigs on consecutive nights, but, despite this, the venue is uncomfortably jammers. Secondly, the constant hum of chatter from the bar at the back and the unavoidable clanking of glasses by the bar staff detracts attention from the somewhat timid but beguiling presence of Ms Keineg on stage.
Still, you could have heard a pin drop at times and should one have fallen, it would've been told to shush by a pocket of intense devotees. It's hard to say what separates the singer songwriter with multiple origins (she has a Welsh accent, but claims allegiance to a number of other places- Ireland, New York) from so many others who do the same kind of thing.
Like many females in the industry, she looks gorgeous, her sad chocolate brown eyes partially hidden by an unruly fringe. Though she appears a little self-conscious, she chats easily with the crowd, telling stories about her intelligent and heartfelt songs that are not without humour, as displayed in 'Hitler was a momma's boy' and 'Olé Conquisidor' ("this is for George Bush!"). Her debut album, "O Seasons O Castles" and especially her second album, "Jet", get a good airing, highlighting a body of work that has always been critically acclaimed, but commercially obscure. Katell performs the title track off her new EP, 'What's the only thing worse than the end of time?', and, even on first listening, it gives you tingles.
What makes this lady stand out is not just her ability to play the guitar or write an intelligent, beautiful song, or even her unassuming presence. It's her voice, soaring and swooping and, at times, squeaking as you stand in disbelief that such vocal acrobatics are possible. Three encores later, Katell Keineg is still on stage and, for her last song, does a cover of a rock number that sees her doing her best PJ Harvey impression. The rock chick role suits her, until mid strut, when she starts to giggle and so does the crowd.
If you haven't discovered Katell Keineg yet, get your hands on one of her albums. You'll be in for a real treat.
- Anne-Louise Foley
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Esquire 9.99
The Best CDs You've Never Heard
The greatest overlooked pop masterpieces of the decade
Katell Keineg, Jet (1997, Elektra)
You can't listen to Celtic music anymore. You just can't. Celine Dion and Michael Flatley rammed a
stake into that whole tin-whistles-and-uilleann-pipes routine. You can, however, listen to Katell Keineg, a beguiling Welsh singer who managed, briefly, to rescue the into-the-mystic vibe from the
clutch of the cheese merchants.
Jet is a weird album; it seems to have been made in a bubble, without any regard for marketing or programming. Keineg leaps from an Enya-style moorscape ("The Battle of the Trees") to a jukebox sing-along ("One Hell of a Life"), from an elegy for some forgotten surrealist ("Leonor") to what feels like Doris Day swooning over Caesar in an opium daze ("Veni Vidi Vici"). Jet vexes you like a dream: There's
logic to it, but it's buried way down deep.
- Jeff Gordinier
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Musician 8.97
Review of Jet
Big sounds, big ideas, big thrills. On her second album, Katell Keineg has the nerve to promise a cosmic experience and the skills to deliver. Though the sweetly graceful vocals echo such civilized folks as Joni Mitchell and Natalie Merchant, Keineg's friskier than either of 'em, and her knack for turning simple tunes into breathtaking epics can be flat-out dazzling. In other words: Wow!
While the album's concerns include such vexing matters as mortality and loneliness, Jet makes it hard not to smile, because raging passion illuminates every note. Though the spooky "Ole, Conquistador" scoffs at the "patriarchal order," and the soaring "Leonor" celebrates a real-life free spirit of the Surrealist era, Keineg's flair for the dramatic is usually its own message, an inspirational display of exuberant will.
That's just as well, since her headlong delivery and the dynamic waves of sound can make it impossible to figure out exactly what's going on. Better simply to savor the breezy cool of "Veni, Vidi, Vici" or surrender to the vortex of "Marietta", highlighted by Keineg's exotic Yoko-like effects. Wailing, singing, sighing, and generally wringing every drop of emotion from the colorful melodies, she often seems on the verge of babbling in tongues, consumed by rapture and loving every second of it.
Keineg makes lousy background music, because she can't be ignored. Consider "Smile", a standout among many stellar tracks. Beginning as an insistent whisper, it slowly builds to an electrifying, primal shriek chorus; meanwhile, the dense, finely detailed production (by Keineg, Eric Drew Feldman, and John Holbrook) reveals exciting facets with every listen. More than a well-crafted piece of product, Jet will intoxicate anyone who still believes pop music can transcend dreary reality.
- Jon Young
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Los Angeles Times 7.27.97
Welcome to Her World
Katell Keineg doesn't try to wrap her songs in swaths of culturally diverse sound. But her travels seem to have gotten under her skin.
NEW YORK--When singer Katell Keineg was an impressionable young girl in Wales, she went to see the Led Zeppelin concert film "The Song Remains the Same." Staring at singer Robert Plant in all his mystical splendor, she knew she had found her calling.
"I thought he was God on two legs," Keineg recalls wistfully, sipping tea in the midtown Manhattan offices of Elektra Records. "I thought, 'I want to be like him.' So I got my hair cut and permed, and I started to sing!"
The lanky, 32-year-old Keineg laughs, as she does often, revealing a smile as wide and toothy as Julia Roberts'.
It wasn't the only time an infatuation became a musical inspiration for her.
"I essentially started playing guitar because I had a crush on George Harrison," Keineg adds. "For years I was embarrassed to say that. But part of what draws you to music, I think, is eroticism."
The songs on Keineg's second album, "Jet"--which since its June release has received rave reviews and spawned a single, "One Hell of a Life," that is fast becoming a staple of adult-alternative radio--boast an earthy sensuality that, like the music of her adolescent heroes, suggests diverse influences. A native of Brittany, France, who spent much of her childhood in Wales and has been based in Dublin, Ireland, for the past seven years, Keineg litters her lyrical tunes with Celtic, European, Arabic, African and Latin textures and imagery, and her lilting soprano voice combines the siren-like clarity of an Irish folk songstress with the sultry minimalism of a jazz chanteuse.
"People ask me if I make a conscious effort to use musical ideas from different countries and cultures," Keineg says. "I don't really think I do. I hate records that take that sort of approach--like, 'Let's get an African drummer and a Bulgarian singer.' I don't want to be identified with that. But I suppose that when you travel, the places that you go to become a part of who you are."
The singer-songwriter is the daughter of French poet Paol Keineg, to whom she attributes her love of language. Her Welsh mother, a retired schoolteacher, is a local representative for Plaid Cymru, a political party seeking Wales' independence from Britain. As children, Keineg and her older brother divided their time between the homelands of both parents; later, she went to college in London and lived in New York, where she appeared at downtown clubs and cafes and where she still stays frequently when not in Dublin.
While building a reputation as a graceful, emotive live performer in the early '90s, Keineg released a seven-inch single called "Hestia" on SOL, an independent label co-owned by musicians Bob Mould and Nicholas Hill. Elektra took note, and signed Keineg in 1993. The following year, she made her album debut with "O Seasons O Castles," which made her a favorite among critics and industry insiders and led to a gig singing backup on Natalie Merchant's 1995 album, "Tigerlily."
For "Jet," Keineg enlisted "Tigerlily" engineer John Holbrook and ex-Captain Beefheart associate and current PJ Harvey band member Eric Drew Feldman as co-producers. The three set up shop in a big house near Bearsville Studios in Woodstock, N.Y., and spent a relatively leisurely two months recording in the living room.
"When I was making my first album, I don't think I had enough time to reflect," says Keineg. "This time, we didn't have to work inhumane hours. We put in eight-hour days instead of 14-hour days, which left more time to consider things, and to change them if necessary. We could also just hang out on the porch and play music, or talk, or paint, or get drunk. The album had more life around it."
Keineg is currently hanging out and playing music with Merchant and a host of other popular female artists on this summer's Lilith Fair tour. For Keineg, the success of the event and the increasing prominence of women on the pop charts are part of a larger social trend. The politician's daughter points to the significant role that female voters played in recent national elections in the U.S. and England, and the fact that there is an unprecedented number of women in the British Parliament. She acknowledges, however, that the testosterone-challenged still face certain pressures and hurdles, particularly in her field.
"It's a difficult thing, as a woman artist, to be sexual in your own way," Keineg says. "If you can fit into a certain stereotype, it definitely makes marketing easier. I mean, I wear push-up bras on occasion. I try not to in photos, but I do onstage. Increasingly, in fact, there is pressure to be cheesecake. I wonder sometimes whether someone like Janis Joplin would be able to make it if she came along right now."
But in the view of Nancy Jeffries, the senior vice president of A&R at Elektra Records who brought Keineg to the label, the singer's own prospects have little to do with her babe quotient.
"I saw Katell perform solo with her guitar a number of times before we signed her," says Jeffries, "and the audience response was overwhelming. She supplied a kind of reality that people were hungry for. She is one of those acts with whom you have to take a little more time and be a little bit more dedicated in your approach, but she provides the inspiration for that whenever people see her play live. A friend of mine did recently, and afterwards she told me, 'I think I've just experienced the complete range of human emotions in an hour and a half.' So I think Katell's natural appeal to people is irresistible, and it's just a matter of time."
Fortunately, Keineg seems patient, and intent on remaining true to her quirky, eclectic instincts.
"I don't really think about what's gonna happen with my album commercially," she says. "In some ways, I'd like to be more experimental. There are always different strands of things I'm interested in. It's all about listening--that's how you move forward musically. And that, really, is my job."
- Elysa Gardner
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Newsweek 6.30.97
Review of Jet
Katell Keineg's new album, "Jet," meshes rock muscularity and heady emotionalism, Middle Eastern scales and Springsteenish anthems. We haven't graduated to the literary complexity of the 51/2-minute opus "Battle of the Trees" yet, but we know a good riff when we hear one; by the time the song sweeps into its exquisitely layered crescendo, we're deep inside.
- Karen Schoemer with Yahlin Chang and Kate Cambor
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The Atlanta Journal and Constitution 6.26.97
Review of Jet
Rating: B+
One of the year's swell surprises, the second album by New York - based vocalist Katell Keineg is the kind of dreamy pop you figured people forgot how to make after the 1960s. Yet, it's sung by a young songwriter whose vocal gifts are timeless and contemporary, with a flexible attitude that welcomes experimentation and makes it part of a seamless swirl. The songs on "Jet" jump around, though. As distinct as Keineg's delicate, feathery elocution is, she can call to mind a higher-browed Natalie Merchant (the folk-rocking "One Hell of a Life") or a slipstream-bound Sinead O'Connor ("Smile"). It's the ease with which she navigates a complex patch of lyrics (the triumphant thumbnail biography of "Leonor") and engages producer Eric Drew Feldman's ambient textures that displays an intrepid poet's spirit.
-Steve Dollar
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Entertainment Weekly 6.20.97
Review of Jet
Rating: A-
Dublin-based Welshwoman Keineg applies her breathtaking soprano to a dazzling array of confessional lyrics and instrumental colors. Lurching from peaceful folk to Zeppelin-powered rock, from dense power pop to whimsical bossa nova, she proves herself to be a stunning singer of boundless invention.
- Bob Cannon
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Mojo 10.94
For this Celtic soul, freedom involves being on a stage or, possibly, sleeping in a passageway under the sea.
Here's the deal. You fly all the way from London to Dublin to hear Katell Keineg sing the arcane and beautiful Hestia, one of the most extraordinary songs you've ever loved. You've played it dozens of times since it was first available (as a single on Bob Mould's Singles Only Label a couple of years ago) and you're still no closer to finding its core. You admire that in a song.
Odd lines strike you every time, like the opening "You are witnessing a start". You're very fond of "I've been sleeping in a passageway under the sea" and the strangely lovely chorus always gets you: "I want you/But I dont want your monkey." You presume it's about falling for a junkie. But what you know for certain is that the three notes she chose for "I want you" are perfect. On the record there's a marvellous section where strings swell while timpanis and accordians clamour and it nearly always makes you want to cry. How often does that happen? but there it is, a song you barely understand, with a fantastic melody - sung in the most tender but dynamic way by this wood-smoked voice with a delicious Welsh lilt - that encourages tears.
And she doesn't play it. Typical.
Never mind, though, because she does sing her tumultous heart out, despite suffering from the chicken-pox. (The first couple of rows loved that revelation!) It's soon apparant that Hestia isnt the only song with plenty of intriguing lines. In fact it wouldn't be too outrageous to declare Katell Keineg a poet who sings. She's infectious (hah!). She mucks about and grins and breaks down everyone's nerves before delivering these tricky creations. You are stunned, charmed - entertained, dammit.
You've already had chicken - pox, so you take the chance and pop backstage after to give her a hard time for not playing your favourite song. "You should have yelled out," she says, expansive grin on the go. She is, you think, enourmously chuffed to be here. "Oh yes I really love doing this. It's just a joy."
Katell Keineg (CAT-ell KAY-neck) was born in France of Breton father and Welsh mother. Her parents were active in the Breton independence movement and she was exposed at an early age to both French and Welsh folk music. The family moved to Wales and young Katell took to singing in choirs and at eisteddfods, developing a crush on George Harrison, singing along to the Beatles, Led Zep and The Skids and, aged 16, began busking in Cardiff. As her confidence built she travelled round Britain and Eire to play ad hoc gigs. She particularly liked the reception she was afforded in Dublin, met her manager there and decided to make the city her home.
Her first album, O Seasons O Castles, was recorded in New York with former Lou Reed/Scritti Politti man Fred Maher in the producer's chair and accompaniment from her regular stage companions Paul Tiernan and double-bass player Garvan Gallagher. It's an ambitious collection which offers up spoken passages, chilling ballads, feroucious growls of pain and upbeat jazzy interludes during an emotional hour or so on your deck.
At the Whelan's show she unveils some excellent post-album material too. I was particularly taken with a song called Mother's Map with the closing refrain "I'm 10 percent free", sung in a poignantly optimistic way. Is that how you feel then, 10 percent free?
"Yes it is. I feel a lot of constraints, some of them just as a human being, a lot of them as a woman, you feel limited in 10 million subtle ways. Feeling an obligation to be liked, to fit in with other people, relying on the grid of relationships - which are both a strain and a pleasure. It's the old individual versus the community thing. How many bits of yourself do you have to chop off to fit in with the community? Thats why I'm so happy when I'm up on stage, becuase I'm much more free than I am at any other time."
What would it take to achieve the other 90 percent of your freedom? "Becoming Mahatma Ghandi? I dunno."
How about 40 years perched on top of a pole?
"Hermitage certainly appeals. But I would miss human contact."
Is Hestia about fancying a junkie? "Could be. A monkey could be anything that you rely on, any destructive habit."
But presumably you wrote it with that in mind, someone who comes with baggage. "I suppose so. The songs are all from personal experience."
You must have had a turbulent emotional life.
"Well...it's all relative!"
- Jim Irvin
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New York Magazine 10.3.94
Talent
Wales and Whispers
"I'd like people to improvise with my name," laughs Katell Keineg. "Take it where it's never been before." For the less adventurous, it's CAT-ell Kay-neck, and for the uninitiated, this copper-haired Welshwoman has one of the most striking Celtic voices we've heard in some time. The singer's aching, husky alto coos, scats, whispers, and wails unstoppably through her debut album, O Seasons O Castles (Elektra), and her spare acoustic performances have riveted boisterous pub and club audiences for several years now.
Relationships, places, hopes and terrors - she's starkly rendered them all with a voraciously poetic sense of language. Keineg's general terrain is somewhere between Rimbaud and Van Morrison. On "Partisan," the hip-hop-infused single from O Seasons she drawls, "I want to crawl through every garden path, peel the back off every house, gaze at every waking room and memorize it inside out." "I think the phrase 'God is in the details' just about says it all," Keineg adds by way of explaining her lyrics.
Now living in Dublin, Keineg, who is in her twenties, says that she is eager to return to New York, where she lived and performed from 1992 to 1993. "I like the smell. New York and America generally - they have a smell that you don't get anywhere else in the world. It's halfway between floor polish and pizza." Keineg performs at the Mercury Lounge on October 7 and 8.
- Chris Norris
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Irish Times 7.30.94
Katell Tales
Jack Charlton may be our most famous honorary Irishman but the famale equivalent of that accolade may soon go to Welsh-Breton singer/songwriter, Katell Keineg, if her bid for stardom proves successul. Last October Ms Keineg signed a worldwide deal with Elektra Records, which means that the rest of the planet may now learn what Irish gig-goers have known for a long time: the Dublin-based singer with the silky voice is touched by that old Celtic magic.
Since she put pen to contract, Katell has been back and forth between Dublin's Windmill Lane studios and New York's AXIS studios, preparing and recording her debut album, poetically titled O Seasons O Castles . The "street date" of the album is September 9th and it will feature many of Katell's live favourites, including Hestia, Destiny's Darling, and the first single from the album, Partisans. Anyone who has been to more than one Katell concert will know that she has the knack of changing around the arrangements of her songs without losing their essence and here, with the help of producer Fred Maher (who worked on Lou Reed's New York), she playes the chameleon once again to excellent effect.
Although the New World beckons, Katell hasn't forgotten her old musical cohorts and featured players on the album include Paul Tiernan, Garvan Gallagher and Maurice Seezer. She hasn't let herself get sucked into the mainstream either and the album honestly reflects both her Celtic roots and her interest in everything from the folk of Joni Mitchell to the rock of Led Zeppelin. In a music industry awash with new women singers who are ploughing the same pop furrow, Katell stands apart in a fertile patch of her own. Time will tell if her singularity will translate into celebrity. On Tuesday, Katell plays her first official gig in Dublin since last autumn, playing Whelans on Wexford street, after which she jets off around America and Europe to launch the album. With a firm footing in the folk and rock cultures of both continents, there's no reason why Katell Keineg's appeal shouldn't straddle both sides of the Atlantic.
- Kevin Courtney
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