Christian Kjellvander - Ex Voto / The Silent Love (2025) [Official Digital Download]

Following acclaimed outings About Love and Loving Again and Hold Your Love Still, Christian Kjellvander returns with Ex Voto / The Silent Love, a quietly devastating and profoundly intimate record that completes an unofficial trilogy exploring love in its most tender, conflicted, and spiritual forms. Originally conceived as an album of ten soft, calm country songs, Ex Voto gradually evolved into something more expansive, yet the embryo of that intention remains, pulsing gently beneath every track. The record opens with two stripped-back songs, flows into a louder, more dynamic centre piece, then drifts back into stillness, mirroring the emotional journey of its creation. As with its predecessors, Ex Voto continues Christian’s exploration of themes like love, religion, the natural world, and beauty, subjects he approaches with poetic precision and emotional depth. But this album goes deeper. It is more intimate, more raw. Christian was in a different place when he began writing it, and while the gravitational centre of his artistry remains constant, that personal shift colours the entire record. Recorded live over a few days in an old summer house by the sea at Sweden’s southern tip, the album captures the breath and quiet of a room where no headphones were needed, where vocals bleed into the space through a PA, and every creak of the floorboards became part of the sound. The spectres of each voice and instrument haunt the multi-tracks like spirits lingering in a deep desert night. It’s romantic and cinematic, a kind of small-town noir transposed from the Texan wilderness to the Swedish coast. At the heart of the record is Kjellvander’s deep, expressive baritone and lyrical clarity, surrounded by a sparse yet richly textured palette: brush drums, bass clarinet, mournful cornet, Rhodes, synths, and the haunting counterpoint of female vocals. From the ghostly intimacy of “Love of Another” to the stormy crescendo of “Deathrider,” the album moves with patience and purpose. Songs like “God Simple” and “It Can Heal If You Let It” ride slow grooves into emotional catharsis, while “The View Is Watching” swells into a shadowy, psychedelic dirge. Even the instrumental “Ex Voto” hums with spiritual weight. Producer Tobias Fröberg focused on the scale of Christian’s voice and the gravity of his words, using reverb to lend a hyper-real quality to the album’s mood. The sound is different to its predecessors, and so was the recording process - just players in a room, leaning into the silence between sounds. The result is a document of presence: atmospheric, unguarded, and emotionally resonant. Ex Voto / The Silent Love is a record that inspires patience. It’s not to be consumed, but sat with, like a long conversation late into the night.

Tracklist:
01 Love of Another
02 Hole in My Heart
03 God Simple
04 The View Is Watching
05 Obsession
06 It Can Heal You If You Let It
07 Ex Voto
08 Deathrider
09 Reasonable Love


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