PRESS QUOTES
Rolling Stone
“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.”
Time Magazine
“Folksy and hypnotic.”
Newsweek Magazine
“Katell Keineg’s new album, ‘Jet’, meshes rock muscularity
and heady emotionalism. 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.”
The New York Times
“Katell Keineg has a voice so charged with feeling that it lifts
everything she sings to the level of a primal wail.”
The Times
“Keineg is a singer and songwriter who gains her power by
juxtaposing ugly with beautiful and then letting the two battle
it out for ascendancy.”
New Yorker
“The voice of Katell Keineg is a beautiful and wild force of
nature.”
The Irish TimeS
“… it was Katell Keineg’s slow-burning fuse, igniting on her
magnificent ‘The Gulf Of Araby’, that truly captured the
essence of (Victor) Jara.”
Tom Moon
National Public Radio
“ Here are wildly inspired songs filled with literate and
mystical images, songs that aspire to the sprawl and sweep
of epic novels.”
The Guardian
“Keineg’s quirky compositions, infused with a haunting,
ethereal quality, are something entirely of her own creation.
The haunting becomes almost literal on ‘Leonor’, a jaunty
setting of a Guardian obituary of the Surrealist painter
Leonor Fini.”
Jeff Gordiner
X Saves The World, Penguin, 2008
“River Man,” by Katell Keineg. Technically Nick Drake was a boomer, but since
the Woodstock generation ignored him, it was up to Xers to rediscover and
reclaim his diffident, whispery melancholia. In sensibility, at least, he’s one of
us. Katell Keineg’s live version of Drake’s “River Man,” from a hard-to- find EP
of hers called What’s the Only Thing Worse Than The End of Time, is so sublime
that I can’t even figure out what to say about it.”
The Village Voice
“…a talent blessed with Denny’s vocal capabilities and
literary lyrical skills that Richard Thompson should envy.”
The Vancouver Sun
“Truly weird.”
LA Times
“Conveying a nearly beatific sense of joy in performance.”
The Independent
“Spacious and spooky.”
Details
“A smart girl who needs an exorcist.”
NME
“The arrangement of the song (Mama, You’ve Been On My
Mind), leaves everybody in bits. There’s no instruments
involved, which is something Sinead (O’ Connor) has done
in the past, but now she’s got Katell Keineg singing in a
heavenly counterpoint – exotic and sad like nothing I’ve
heard before.”
The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Keineg’s best work – the transfixing inventory of wild hope,
‘The Gulf Of Araby,’ the bitter ‘Franklin’ – exhibits a
poignancy we don't hear much any more.”
NY Magazine
“… a voraciously poetic sense of language.”
Birmingham Post
“Richard Thompson on Tamazepan.”
Manchester Evening News
“Intoxicating strangeness”
Musician Magazine
“More than a well-crafted piece of product, ‘Jet’ will
intoxicate anyone who still believes pop music can transcend
dreary reality.”
The San Francisco Chronicle
“Katell Keineg defies facile categorisation. Fascinated by
unlikely instrumentation, Keineg also writes some of the
smartest lyrics around.”
Esquire Magazine
The Best CDs You’ve Never Heard
“’Jet’ is a weird album; it seems to have been made in a
bubble, without any regard for marketing or programming.
(It) vexes you like a dream: There’s logic to it, but it’s buried
way down deep.”
Time Out New York
“Katell Keineg is a genre-straddling songwriter and
performer – unfortunately, she’s so hard to pigeonhole that
she’s still flying below the radar despite an arresting body of
work. Her music, however, remains as strong, sly and
beautiful as ever.”
LA Weekly
“ 'What’s The Only Thing Worse Than The End Of Time?’ a
hypnotically contrapuntal four-song EP featuring a haunting
rendition of Nick Drake’s ‘River Man’. Not bad for her first
recording in five years. Our hope is that this time she doesn’t
find the buzz from the music bizz too ‘intoxicating’ and
wander away like before, just as she was cultivating a small
but devoted following among critics and fans with ‘Ô
Seasons, Ô Castles’ and ‘Jet’ .”
Living With Music: A Playlist by Amanda Stern
The New York Tmes
The Gulf of Araby, Katell Keineg.
“I came across Katell Keineg in 1993 at the St. Mark’s Place club Sin-é and have been telling everyone about her since.
I have no idea what this song is about, but it stuns me. Keineg’s voice is unfiltered and courageous;
I feel like she’s singing from deep inside herself, straight from her leukocytes.
It’s a song of “ifs,” a song of “what is,” and “what can never be.” It’s a ballad to lost causes.”