Devout and dark rock

by Erik Krebbers
from Dutch newspaper De Stentor, July 2006

That Woven Hand would one day come to Hellendoorn is something a serious music lover wouldn't think possible. The venue that is known for its sweltering, steamy (blues) rock shows all of a sudden became the enigmatic stage for the most devout pupil of all rock artists, David Eugene Edwards.

With his dissolved band 16 Horsepower, Edwards fired a dark mix of rock, folk and country, at his listeners, while he didn't make a secret of his faith in the Lord in his professing lyrics. Since about five years Woven Hand has been his new metaphysical outlet and it seems as though with the passing of years that the man stands further and further away from reality. The recently released album Mosaic is a diffuse labyrinth of poetic inaccessibility, but at the same time is evidence of a stylistic richness. A mysterious product, that hardly gets any clarification on the Lantaarn's dim stage. Edwards rattles his lyrics with closed eyes to himself into the distorting microphone. “All His Glory, Hallelujah.”

The ambience is oppressing and ominous, also because of threatening soundscapes in between songs. This makes Woven Hand an intense, but inscrutable roots band. Winter Shaker is hallucinatory and haunting like a feverish convulsion in your veins and Elktooth with its monotonous pounding accompaniment sounds like music for a remake of the Exorcist. Dirty Blue is one of the most hopeful and optimistic sounding tracks of this evening.

The contact with the audience is, as always, fragile and during the quieter parts of the show Edwards seems miles away, for his band members too. Somewhere on an island, like a paranoid hermit muttering. Special and sometimes moving. A Woven Hand show is never ordinary, it always knows to upset you in one way or another.

Translation by Annemarie