Woven Hand is the side project of vocalist David Eugene Edwards from the brilliant band 16 Horsepower. Musically speaking Woven Hand is in the same landscape as 16hp, but with more emphasis on an acoustic instrumentation, and a bit more gloomy and darker - if that is possible…

Even though David Eugene Edwards is on the road to promote new material under a new band name, it doesn't mean that it's over for 16 Horsepower - and thank God for that. The band that released one of the absolute best albums in my record collection, "Secret South" from 2000, will enter the studio again before long. And in the meantime Woven Hand is quite a good substitute.

Sunday night Edwards & co visited So What!, where they delivered the goods on stage, sound and solid. The problem was that only a handful of the audience could actually see the band in action. That the stage at So What! is not high is a well-known fact - and when, in addition to this, everybody in the band performs sitting down on the worlds lowest chairs, only the die-hard fans in the front row have the opportunity to see what's actually going on, on stage. A shame since the whole impression weakens when it's impossible to see fuck all of the band!

David Eugene Edwards has to be one of the most quirky and most fascinating personalities I know. He is a frighteningly good songwriter, in the truest sense of the word. Edwards is deeply religious, and writes doomsday lyrics that make you jumpy and fearful, and he performs them in his own distinctive way with his special voice - as a kind of accompaniment to your worst nightmares.

An incredibly late start, made the audience quite impatient, but finally - when the clock approached half past eleven, the band enters stage. Then there's the matter of the view … But anyway, it's definitely not the band's fault, and when they open with "The Good Hand" we're off.

Personally I don't think the Woven Hand material is as equally strong as that on most 16hp-albums. A lot of it is great but some of the songs have a tendency to run into each other, and this can get somewhat monotonous. Some might have expected a couple of 16hp-songs, but it were almost exclusively songs from Woven Hand that were given preference to. But the fact that the 16hp-song "Straw Foot" was my favourite of the night, does actually say more about 16hp then about Woven Hand. It sounds just as creepy as one could guess, and the material is on the average of a very high level. David Eugene Edwards is as always a man of few words, and has precisely zero contact with his relatively responsive audience. But it's things like this that make him as enigmatic as he is.

A good concert, but we are looking more forward to the new 16 Horsepower album, and the next visit to Norway - hopefully taking place at a larger venue with a higher stage…

Translation by Jorgen