With a name like Wovenhand, one could be forgiven for expecting some sort of pagan/folk metal malarkey – you know, that whole portmanteau word thing, like Skyclad or Dragonsbum or something. When you learn that the reference is to hands woven in prayer, however, the picture changes somewhat. Perhaps something a little more fragile, more intimate… Then you put the thing on, and all these preconceptions go out of the window in a maelstrom of BIG, BIG music. Wovenhand are EPIC. This is a big-budget Cormac McCarthy movie, or a crazy prophecy dreamed after a night on the Communion wine somewhere out on the prairie.
“Beautiful The Axe,” the album’s opener, sets out their stall pretty well – starting with some fairly innocuous guitar which turns into an ominous almost-goth verse part, the whole thing gets overwhelmed with a big stompy Western (in the “spaghetti” sense rather than the “country and…” sense) rock-out, like a High Plains New Model Army or something. The vocals do that Simon Bonney trick of sounding simultaneously assured and apprehensive, but more about them later. It’s all very portentous – lines like “on the morning of his second day” are tossed about with gay abandon, yet never break the “oh for flip’s sake” barrier, always sounding perfectly attuned to the sonic chaos being perpetrated behind them. By the time the “whoo-whoo”s come on in the backing vocals, you’ll already know whether you like this band or not.
It’s pretty immediate stuff, with a dynamic seemingly designed to let an angry moshpit have a few seconds’ breathing/finding glasses/wiping sweat off face space. And it’s straight into the Nephilim-meets-City-Solution intro to “Horsetail”, and you know you’re here for the ride. It’s all very ominous and portentous, from “Horsetail'”s “There is number to your hours” to another song’s apocalyptic refrain of “Not one stone atop another will stand.” It’s not all omen and portent, though, and they really let their hair down on the sleazy glam-grind of “White Knuckle Grip,” which sounds like the Bad Seeds jamming with Peter Murphy in his Love Hysteria Iggy-alike period.
But yeah, it’s BIG. Even the sinister lounge-jazz of “Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars” is big. It’s VERY big. And you should probably get it. Go on. Imagine you’re eating a lot of pies and put on Ten Stones.
I’ll get my coat.
-Deuteronemu 90210 amid an Old Testament shootout-
