So far, we've reviewed two Woven Hand records, and each time, we invariably slipped completely out of objectivity and giddily gushed about the sheer brilliance of this band... We hate to break it to you, but this time is going to be no different. In fact, it's bound to be way worse because, if you can believe it, this record is even better, and darker, and more suffocatingly
apocalyptic, more biblically brutal, more overtly religious, more instrumentally obtuse, more sonically unpredictable, more soul-shearingly heartbreaking and quite possibly the best record of the year!
Woven Hand is David Eugene Edwards, who fronts the equally brilliant Sixteen Horsepower, a dark and doomy swamp folk outfit that peddles gorgeously dreary ballads of death and destruction. Woven Hand takes the sound of Sixteen Horsepower even further down that dark and seldom travelled path. Tales of an angry God, fire and brimstone, confusion and misery, the coming Rapture, lost souls, death and misery and the long hard road to salvation are set inside mini musical epics of biblical proportions. Acoustic guitars, mournful piano, throbbing upright bass, shuffling drums, weeping strings and creepy fuzzy
ambience back up and propel forward Edwards' gorgeous throaty wail.
But it's not just pretty and sad and creepy, it's absolutely menacing, intense
and as heavy as a band like this can be. Imagine the Swans playing country ballads or a born-again Nick Cave with a bayou pick up band forced to play the devil for their souls.
This record is just so goddamn good, so utterly soulful and important. It's everything music should be. You don't need to agree with Edwards' spiritual bent, or even understand what he's on about. This music is passionate, pure and
heartfelt and disturbingly personal. Thus it's more important than 90 percent of the music that gets made these days. Listening to Woven Hand, you can't help but imagine them playing atop a crumbling mount, as the cities below them lay in ruin, flames and famine, death and pestilence ravaging the land, while the band, suffused with a heavenly glow, plays one last dirge, a skeletal ode to death, a bittersweet funereal lament, as the human race sinks into oblivion
and the world prepares to begin anew.
- the staff of Aquarius Records
Review
text copyright © 2004 Aquarius Records.
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