Send "Wovenhand " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 In the indie rock world, it's hard to build a career that puts your religion front and center, but David Eugene Edwards seems to have figured out a way of presenting his faith in a way that's palatable to a secular audience. The most important thing is that over the course of about a dozen albums with Sixteen Horsepower and Wovenhand, he's never been a proselytizer. Nor, for that matter, has he been cloyingly worshipful. Instead, he uses Pentecostal language to explore fear, doubt, and uncertainty. These feelings are universal, and the fact that Edwards is able to call on a preacher's fervor to energize his singing has produced some bracing moments on record. That Wovenhand have landed on a label owned by the Danielson Famile makes sense.Sixteen Horsepower was an interesting band for the way it drew mostly American folk traditions into an aggressive, modern sound. Wovenhand, which began as a side project and lately includes fellow Horsepower founder Pascal Humbert on bass, draws a little more expansively on folk traditions. On The Threshingfloor, the band's sixth studio album, you'll hear traces of Indian, Celtic, and Middle Eastern folk mixed in with the rock band setup and Anglo-Appalachian murder ballad templates. The title track is a great example of all these things coming together. The drums swipe at Edwards as he wails, occasionally slipping out of English to sing in a language I can't identify, and the guitar in the instrumental break sounds modeled on Arabic oud music. Many songs have a static chord structure or central drone that lends them a hypnotic quality. The album's least successful moments generally come when Edwards restrains himself too much with vocal filters, placing a layer of studio interference between himself and you as he sings about Ezekiel. For instance, it keeps the otherwise propulsive "Denver City" from fully hitting home. One exception is "His Rest", which is one of the most unpretentiously beautiful things Edwards has ever had his hands on. The surprisingly light touch of his singing and the unmoored chord progression infuse the mostly acoustic song a sense of intense longing a million miles away from the fire and fear of something like "Terre Haute", with its flailing Celtic flute, fractured drumming, and frantic vocal....full text |
| Thelineofbestfit |
| The Threshingfloor is the name of the newly-released seventh album from Wovenhand. The title refers to the location where, in times past, the edible part of grain (or similar crops) was separated from the less-appetizing chaff that encased it. However, it could also refer to the fact that few bands ever make it to album number seven. Fortunately for the world, five years after the end of 16 Horsepower and about eighteen years after beginning his career in music, David Eugene Edwards does not seem to be running short on ideas: The Threshingfloor is a high-quality record of powerful lyrics delivered by Edwards’s powerful voice and supported by instrumentation done in a variety of musical styles. It’s immediately obvious that folk music has a strong pull on Wovenhand, but the band does not restrict themselves to any particular geographic region or time period. Middle Eastern instrumentation shows up on the title track, while ‘His Rest’ and ‘Truth’ have electronic elements to them. With its country style, closer ‘Denver City’ could have been put out by 16 Horsepower and “Raise Her Hands” draws influence from the music of Native Americans. In short, The Threshingfloor is a melting pot where the elements work both individually and as a whole. The diversity of the music is admirable, as is the fact that the voice of Edwards fits each different context. The man has quite a pair of pipes, and is not above a little electronic modification to spice things up a little. As is typical with this style of music, the lyrics are at the forefront with Wovenhand, and they are obviously painstakingly crafted. The majority of the lyrics written by Edwards are immediately identifiable as Christian-themed. Unfortunately, that’s probably the trait of Wovenhand that will divide people the most, rather than the quality of the music. The material on this album draws from both the Old and New Testaments. The album’s titular image is a common one in the older books, while ‘A Holy Measure’ is a straight-forward paean to Jesus Christ....full text |
| Soundsxp |
| This wasn’t what I expected; even knowing a little of David Eugene Edwards’ previous band 16 Horsepower, I wasn’t ready for the assembly of gothic rock, experimental noise, native American music and nu-folk to be encountered here. There’s also a darkly religious mix of salvation and damnation in the lyrics, with references to Jesus and judgement (I remember from RE class the one about the stone rejected by the builder) and epithets seemingly taken straight from the Book of Revelation. The advice in ‘Singing Grass’ that “the beast he plays the harp/ he does deceive the heart/ false fires in the minds of men” is like hearing some fire’n’brimstone preacher right out of the Red States (Edwards and band are from Denver, Colorado). It didn't surprise me that previous releases have been on the saintly Sounds Familyre label. The spiritual language suggests this is devotional music of a particularly heavy and brooding kind – the religion on offer isn’t very consoling. However, it’s not all Old and New Testament slaying and saving. There’s rhythm and ritual in the nu-folk songs (‘Behind Your Breath’ is Espers-style dark folk), and Native American chanting and bhangra beats punctuate the record. Though it might have elements of country and gospel within, the band seem a lot more open to external influences, with an Indian sound particularly striking. It’s not surprising that the final track ‘Denver City’ stands out just by being relatively conventional alt.rock, with shades of the Gun Club, even though it maintains the same darkness. As a record it draws on plenty of sources, and even if the end-of-days mood never lifts it's a fascinating and deeply weird record....full text |
Wovenhand lyrics
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