Christian Kjellvander - About Love and Loving Again (2020)

Mark Kozelek's take on the album: "Christian Kjellvander's voice reminds me of Nick Cave, Bill Calahan, and a somber Chris Isaac. His voice drifts around like an angel and lands right where it should. Beautiful arrangements, great performances and songwriting. 'About Love and Loving Again' is a timeless record that will still sound good in fifty years. Right from the crescendo that welcomes you in before it drops away into an atmospheric landscape, the voice at its centre so quietly intense he may as well be singing inside your own head, Christian Kjellvander's new solo album undeniably feels like a big record. The seven songs on this gently unhurried long-player are allowed to build and meander, make unexpected turns or even pause to look over their own shoulder before moving on, four of them ending way beyond and one just shy of the seven-minute-mark. It comes as a bit of a shock then to learn that this sound that ranges from almost-silence to unbridledly expressive, widescreen hugeness was created mostly as live by a minimal three-piece line-up in a Stockholm studio basement: - Per Nordmark on drums - Pelle Anderson on a Fender Rhodes, a Prophet 5 and a Korg Prologue - Christian Kjellvander on vocals, guitars and whatever came to hand, adding just a touch of bass at the end of two songs. It was May 2020 when this trio congregated, a time, of course, when all of Europe was under strict lockdown, with the famous exception of Sweden. But Kjellvander has a point when he claims that working in the studio also amounts to a kind of self-isolation: "It's very similar. When you're not on tour you're kind of in lockdown. I was living in the country in the middle of nowhere for eight years, and that's kind of been in lockdown." Indeed, About Love And Loving Again is the sound of Christian Kjellvander waving goodbye to the converted old chapel out in the Swedish wilderness where so much of his music of previous years was written and recorded, "The Baptist Lodge" that lends its name to the opening song.