Ex Voto / Silent Love

While singer/songwriter Christian Kjellvander certainly has a niche in the angsty, earthy corners of music, his output has traversed the alternately ambling and gritty lo-fi rock of his group Loosegoats, and moody solo fare that touches on dusty Americana, sinewy rock, and spacey balladry. After releasing his eighth solo LP, the dark and more experimental Wild Hxmans, in 2018, he delivered a pair of discontented, confessional sets, About Love and Loving Again (2020) and Hold Your Love Still (2023), the latter of which took on existential, sociopolitical challenges as well those of a romantic nature. Arriving two years later, Ex Voto/The Silent Love is a brooding, even rawer final entry in an unofficial trilogy on love. Originally conceived as a set of sparse country songs, it turned into something more intense in live sessions at a summer house on the southern tip of Sweden with producer Tobias Froberg, who used not-so-subtle effects to emphasize Kjellvanders deep baritone and devastating ruminations. "Love of Another" opens the album with echoing seesaw plucks of an electric guitar under the singers melancholy recollections of having loved tenderly and with the best intentions. Arrangements expand across songs like "God Simple," with its skeletal tapped snare and guitar tones that morph through amplifiers into the occasional howling synth sustain, and the ominous "The View Is Watching," a seven-minute ramble with full band and gospel-style backing singers (for the second half of the song). Even a track with a title like "It Can Heal You If You Let It" is dingy and anxious, peddling hope like a street-corner hustler, in a sea of reverberation. Playing out much more like a single work than a set of songs, its track times vary widely and unpredictably across loose song structures. Ex Voto/The Silent Love ends on the barren "Reasonable Love," which questions if acceptance comes from exhaustion or a place of grace ("And the lines that they plowed are only beautiful from above/We dont have a choice, its reasonable love"), representative of the albums binary title and persistent state of inner conflict. ~ Marcy Donelson