"I don't want to write reviews now, I would rather listen to Woven Hand now", I just spouted at the top of my voice. And then the enlightenment came: I could of course just as well write a Woven Hand review. This way I could listen to the CD and nevertheless feel useful somehow. And that was completely illusionary. Woven Hand commands that you leave everything else alone, let diner burn and let things take their course. You shall not be engaged in other pastimes besides Woven Hand, and that includes writing reviews. Woven Hand is David Eugene Edwards. The chain-smoking emaciated tamer of accordion and banjo, possessed by the evil spirits of generations of inbred hillbillies, who makes/made 16 Horsepower concerts a spiritual experience.

Made, because 16hp are taking a longish break. In the meantime 16hp-colleague Jean-Yves Tola devotes his time to breeding horses, Pascal Humbert is building a house by hand, and David Eugene Edwards... well, David is still driven by the same old ghosts he has to exorcise. For that reason he has created a platform with Woven Hand that is made-to-measure his intensity and still is slightly removed from 16hp

Without the driving double-bass of Pascal Humbert, who whipped up the songs like a sloshed farmer, the ten pieces on the Woven Hand album are not quite as manic. They allow David Eugene time to develop his stories of madness and love and loneliness in godforsaken peace. He sings about glass eyes and girls with blue silk slips, about bad brandy and joylessness, endless wanderings through a naked world, religious delusion and missed redemption. That in the process the sweat no longer runs from his face to his chin beard does the man, who until now was hunted by wolfhounds through the swamps of America, a lot of good. "Woven Hand" is more peaceful, but not as a consequence less desperate - and desperately beautiful. Hellbilly deluxe.