Kent – B-Sidor 95-00 (2000)

Kent is a Swedish rock band that was hugely popular in the Nordic countries, but almost completely unknown outside of those countries. This is probably because the band sings in Swedish. They tried at some point making English versions of their albums, but the result was kind of disappointing to band's existing fans and thus that experiment didn't really lead anywhere. Anyhow, Kent is one of the most successful Swedish bands of all times and I think it's one of the best as well. Kent's first albums were still a bit unpolished and the last albums tripped themselves in too much focus on electronic instruments at the expense of good songwriting. But the albums in the middle of their career were excellent. This B-side collection includes non-album songs from the first five years in the band's recording history.



Like most of the B-sides collections, this is not necessarily a good album, because the songs sound too different from each other and there's a lack of a proper theme. Nevertheless, there are some absolutely amazing songs on this album and I find it a bit strange why some of them have been left off their albums. I guess 90's was still a time when bands really thought about their albums through and through and even a good song was sometimes left off the album if it didn't fit perfectly in with the other songs. Kent has definitely been productive in those years, since this compilation is two CDs long and consists of 25 songs. Any more contemporary band would've released most of those songs on electronic EPs and maybe also just released more albums as people really don't care about albums as much anymore. I don't know if bands are releasing B-sides compilations anymore because they can just stick all the singles on Spotify.

I guess it says a lot about Kent's popularity that even some of the songs on their B-sides compilation have music videos. And quite well produced music videos. The music video for Chans actually consists of little snippets taken from the history of the band. You can see the changing hairstyles and changing outfits. It's kind of crazy how different the people look within five years. The song is also a good example of a Kent song. It has a beautiful, slightly melancholic melody and well produced pop rock sounds.

Kent is also known for their great album covers. They have their recognisable font almost throughout their career and the album covers look like real art and you can easily remember the albums by their cover design. The two huskies in this album cover make a beautiful image with the blue background colour. I can almost imagine myself in the dark Nordic night in the middle of snow where it's so silent that you can't hear anything except your own feet making sounds in the snow.

I'm not going to go into details about the songs on this album, because there are too many of them. I'll just say that there are some excellent songs and some songs that were rightly left off the albums. As a whole, the album is not very exciting, but there are so many great moments on the album that I definitely think it's worth listening to and I'm glad to own this album.

Listen to the album on Spotify.