ALBUM REVIEW: Holistic Dreams – Kehlvin

Switzerland’s KEHLVIN are a band who should appeal to a few different tribes within the world of heavy music. On one hand, the five-piece’s brand of metallic hardcore recalls the genre at its most gleefully dissonant and chaotic. It evokes the likes of THE DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN and COALESCE, which to many will be high praise indeed. At the same time, there are noticeable shades of early MASTODON and BARONESS in the quintet’s more prog-tinged sludge. Of course, those are some towering comparisons, but the band do their best to live up to them with their third full-length Holistic Dreams.

Bringing an end to a six-year hiatus, Holistic Dreams sees KEHLVIN picking up more or less where they left off. With a 35-minute runtime, it’s a little more trim than most of their output, but still no less savage. True to form, it launches quickly into the crunchy riffing and lumbering bass of opener The Impossibility Of Progress. This one’s a hard-hitting track, with Yonni Chapatte‘s bellowed vocals sitting atop winding riffs and driving, punchy drums. It shows hints of KEHLVIN‘s more dynamic leanings too, closing with a couple of minutes of meditative clean guitars.

As you might expect, the band have plenty more tricks up their sleeves from there. Second track The Walking Clay is a metallic hardcore monster, one laced with aggression and abrasive guttural vocals. Causation Failure after that strikes a whiplash inducing balance between a slow, doomy heft and a chaotic mathy mania. Electric Monks arguably outdoes them all, its stompy chug erupting into a grand yet tortured chorus. Crucial to all this though is that there’s a clear sense of who KEHLVIN are throughout. The consistent sludge definitely helps with that, as does the general fury and intensity of the music contained within. It’s an impressive feat, and perhaps proof of a band with a good couple of decades’ experience under their belts.

If there is an MVP on this record it’s almost certainly Chapatte. Their vocals are often thunderously heavy, evoking the boom of MASTODON‘s Troy Sanders on multiple occasions. Leaving it there would be an oversimplification though. They also exhibits a more unhinged psychosis at points, not least in the aforementioned Electric Monks. Elsewhere, particularly on later tracks, they muster something a little more melodic, albeit still with a harsher edge.

To be fair to the rest of the band, everyone’s performance is solid here. Guitarists Fabien Bedoy and Julien Spielmann keep things varied throughout, bouncing off one another with angular and noisy intensity. They more than deliver on riffs too, as proven by the likes of The Walking Clay and Gently Thinking. Behind them, the rhythm section of Fabien Zennaro (drums) and Baptiste Bourquin (bass) play a sturdy supporting role. It’s these two who add much of the weight to KEHLVIN‘s doomy crush, the latter’s bass growling with plenty of sludge of its own.

The result of this collective effort is an album that stays strong to its end. Its latter half definitely leans more proggy, but the band never lose themselves in this. Dirk My Boy still boasts plenty of throat-grabbing aggro, for example, while Flash Backward brings things to an epic and expansive close. It rounds out an album which never struggles to keep listeners interested, and one that proves KEHLVIN are back with a bang. You might’ve heard a lot of what happens here before, but the quality, craft, and variation this album has to offer makes it one that’s well worth going back to.

Rating: 8/10

Holistic Dreams is set for release on September 24th via Division Records.

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