Christian Kjellvander – Wild Hxmans
Tapete – 2 November 2018
His eighth solo studio album finds Sweden’s answer to Tindersticks’ Stuart Staples and Nick Cave combined brooding on a world in transition, the X replacing the U in the title symbolic of the way we cross others out and ignore them.
Opening with a lengthy glacial instrumental intro, the droning eight-minute plus Strangers In Nordheim sets the stark, apocalyptic mood with a song that would seem to address the issue of immigration and the fear of the unknown and strangeness that it can bring about, calling for empathy and an understanding in encouraging mutual acceptance in the lines:
There aren’t enough wild horses running the streets
They only care for those who care for them first
We once were the wild horses running the streets
We never cared for those who cared for themselves
ending, as it slides into bluesy distorted electric guitar, with the repeated refrain “Baby try not to be too strange/They’re afraid.”
Even longer, at almost ten minutes, the slow and achingly melodic Curtain Maker was inspired by an encounter with a woman from Syria making her way by making curtains in Verona, the refugee experience (“at home where I don’t belong”) to articulate the “cold, brutal, enchaining” silence and stillness in the wake of separation and death, yet the narrator finding hope in the darkness as in the swelling chorus of how, in her craft, “I taught my hands/To always let some light stream in, always let some light come in.”
Loss hangs heavy over the otherworldly drone, desolate single piano notes and electronic wash of Stiegga, conjuring memories of happier times spent with the “flying, fun-loving, laughing nihilist” of the title, the line “I wish I could take your disease and run” portending the unspoken outcome. More specifically rooted in personal experience, The Thing is drifts back to 90s Texas and from there to Spain for a seven-and-a-half minute, slightly more uptempo Thin White Rope-like desert-Americana number fuelled by the deaths of his father and youngest brother that references Madalyn O’Hair, the activist founder of American Atheists and advocate of the separation of church and state who, along with her son and adopted daughter, was murdered by a former employee in 1995.
As the chorus of how “We get lighter for every day/’Til we finally drift away/Where we decide to spread the weight is all that matters”, it’s a meditation on mortality and what we do with our life while we are here, of seeing past the “blind stitches of misery” to “spread the love/Until we finally drift away.”
Conjuring Leone’s westerns with its whistled intro and the cinematic nature of its musical landscape, loaded with Warren Ellis style guitar, Halle Lay Lu Jah (a riposte to the Cohen comparisons that dog him?) is more stream of consciousness expressionism, stringing together lines like “That’s an ugly horse and you’re an ugly human”, “Hotel lobby … 1983 … Lake Tahoe/A green Jazzmaster and a dream” and “Just put your goat skin boots on … your fingers are dripping with it”, but atmospherically effective none the less.
Romantic visions unexpectedly rear their head with Love Xomes, a chugging desert noir number as, drawing on nautical imagery, he sings “Don’t tell me the water’s rough, just bring the damn ship in: and how “Love comes to those who don’t quit”, before a brief contemplative acoustic bridge gives way to the swelling finale and the repeated refrain “Your smile, it keeps me alive.”
It ends with the hushed, brittle, dry ambience of Faux Guernica, based on a road trip with his youngest son through Basque country, a return to the opening theme of caring for others and how coming to know yourself makes you open to the potential for transformation, of how “You are capable of murder/You are capable of change/In that shame and in that light/Lays a better day.” You have to be prepared to open yourself to what the album offers, but once you do, you’ll realise it has the X-factor.