In the indie rock world, it's hard to build a career that puts your religion front and center, but David Eugene Edwards seems to have figured out a way of presenting his faith in a way that's palatable to a secular audience. The most important thing is that over the course of about a dozen albums with Sixteen Horsepower and Wovenhand, he's never been a proselytizer. Nor, for that matter, has he been cloyingly worshipful. Instead, he uses Pentecostal language to explore fear, doubt, and uncertainty. These feelings are universal, and the fact that Edwards is able to call on a preacher's fervor to energize his singing has produced some bracing moments on record. That Wovenhand have landed on a label owned by the Danielson Famile makes sense.
Sixteen Horsepower was an interesting band for the way it drew mostly American folk traditions into an aggressive, modern sound. Wovenhand, which began as a side project and lately includes fellow Horsepower founder Pascal Humbert on bass, draws a little more expansively on folk traditions. On The Threshingfloor, the band's sixth studio album, you'll hear traces of Indian, Celtic, and Middle Eastern folk mixed in with the rock band setup and Anglo-Appalachian murder ballad templates. The title track is a great example of all these things coming together. The drums swipe at Edwards as he wails, occasionally slipping out of English to sing in a language I can't identify, and the guitar in the instrumental break sounds modeled on Arabic oud music. Many songs have a static chord structure or central drone that lends them a hypnotic quality.
The album's least successful moments generally come when Edwards restrains himself too much with vocal filters, placing a layer of studio interference between himself and you as he sings about Ezekiel. For instance, it keeps the otherwise propulsive "Denver City" from fully hitting home. One exception is "His Rest", which is one of the most unpretentiously beautiful things Edwards has ever had his hands on. The surprisingly light touch of his singing and the unmoored chord progression infuse the mostly acoustic song a sense of intense longing a million miles away from the fire and fear of something like "Terre Haute", with its flailing Celtic flute, fractured drumming, and frantic vocal.
At its best, this album is charged with the fiery spark that makes Edwards so compelling, and it finds both the beauty and ugliness in that. At its worst, it's still enjoyable, if less memorable. Wovenhand have a very well-defined aesthetic at this point, so if you're familiar with the band's past work, you know basically what to expect on The Threshingfloor. If you're not familiar, you might consider looking back to Blush Music or Consider the Birds as a starting point for a worthwhile band that has carved itself a unique niche in the indie rock world.
