Esquire Magazine, September 1999

The Best CDs You've Never Heard
The greatest overlooked pop
masterpieces of the decade
September 1999

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