"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