Woven Hand – The Threshing Floor (Sounds Familyre Records)
Christian rock gets a bad name sometimes. It’s easy to look with scorn at every praise-oriented band doing soulless knockoffs of whatever the radio deems socially acceptable enough for imitation. But Black Sabbath, the Electric Prunes, Trouble, and a score of others were able to take the Good Book as inspiration and churn out something that wasn’t a mindless simulacrum of real rock music. Similarly, in recent years much has been made of the spiritual inclinations of Woven Hand songwriter David Eugene Edwards, whose lyrics portray a bleak, apocalyptic take on ideas of faith and redemption.
Parallels could be drawn between the Book of Revelation-style turmoil of Wven Hand’s newest release and the heretical Christian imagery of European neo-folk artists like Current 93. But while the artists are similar in tone and imagery, Woven Hand disregard’s the latter’s fragile gothic tendencies in favor of a muscular dirge which owes equally to Nick Cave’s croon, Earth’s blackened doom/country, and the psychedelic exotica of Sun City Girls and Grails. The songs are more varied than the single-minded darkness of the band’s previous releases – songs like “Singing Grass” are gentler, songs like “Truth” have a subtle electronic element calling to mind post-punk’s bleaker moments, and moments such as the title track are trippier than previous efforts.
Conjuring images of roving old-west preachers out of Cormac McCarthy as much as Old Testament prophets, what Woven Hand offers is not some feel-good version of spirituality. Instead, the focus is on the duplicity of man and the dissolution of everything temporal. “Wolves tied on strings / to good words of promise / these are stones around the people’s neck,” Edwards sings in “Terre Haute,” a line which serves as an excellent summation of his lyrical approach – there are images of nature and its malevolence, of the failings of language, of the temporality of human aspiration,and of doomed resignation all compressed into those three lines. Because of his religious inclination, the lyrics Edwards pens are not without hope, but that hope is more than simple terminology, it is a hard-earned privelege in a largly antagonistic universe.
The Threshing Floor is an album in an awkward position. Many Christian rock fans would be unlikely to embrace a record which turns so thoroughly from the saccharine life-affirming positivity which characterizes the majority of the genre. Those who have an issue with Christian rock might additionally take issue with the religious content contained within. But ultimately,the album is like a Flannery O’Connor novel – the pious can criticize its brutality, the secular can criticize its piety, but the work stands separate from simple binary opposition, offering the listener a glimpse of damnation and hope – but mostly damnation.
Woven Hand – The Threshing Floor (Sounds Familyre Records)
Christian rock gets a bad name sometimes. It’s easy to look with scorn at every praise-oriented band doing soulless knockoffs of whatever the radio deems socially acceptable enough for imitation. But Black Sabbath, the Electric Prunes, Trouble, and a score of others were able to take the Good Book as inspiration and churn out something that wasn’t a mindless simulacrum of real rock music. Similarly, in recent years much has been made of the spiritual inclinations of Woven Hand songwriter David Eugene Edwards, whose lyrics portray a bleak, apocalyptic take on ideas of faith and redemption.
Parallels could be drawn between the Book of Revelation-style turmoil of Wven Hand’s newest release and the heretical Christian imagery of European neo-folk artists like Current 93. But while the artists are similar in tone and imagery, Woven Hand disregard’s the latter’s fragile gothic tendencies in favor of a muscular dirge which owes equally to Nick Cave’s croon, Earth’s blackened doom/country, and the psychedelic exotica of Sun City Girls and Grails. The songs are more varied than the single-minded darkness of the band’s previous releases – songs like “Singing Grass” are gentler, songs like “Truth” have a subtle electronic element calling to mind post-punk’s bleaker moments, and moments such as the title track are trippier than previous efforts.
Conjuring images of roving old-west preachers out of Cormac McCarthy as much as Old Testament prophets, what Woven Hand offers is not some feel-good version of spirituality. Instead, the focus is on the duplicity of man and the dissolution of everything temporal. “Wolves tied on strings / to good words of promise / these are stones around the people’s neck,” Edwards sings in “Terre Haute,” a line which serves as an excellent summation of his lyrical approach – there are images of nature and its malevolence, of the failings of language, of the temporality of human aspiration,and of doomed resignation all compressed into those three lines. Because of his religious inclination, the lyrics Edwards pens are not without hope, but that hope is more than simple terminology, it is a hard-earned privelege in a largly antagonistic universe.
The Threshing Floor is an album in an awkward position. Many Christian rock fans would be unlikely to embrace a record which turns so thoroughly from the saccharine life-affirming positivity which characterizes the majority of the genre. Those who have an issue with Christian rock might additionally take issue with the religious content contained within. But ultimately,the album is like a Flannery O’Connor novel – the pious can criticize its brutality, the secular can criticize its piety, but the work stands separate from simple binary opposition, offering the listener a glimpse of damnation and hope – but mostly damnation.
