David Eugene Edwards has never been an easy fit for many record labels. Through the 1990s, with the brooding folk-rock act 16 Horsepower, and with the stoic solo reflections of Wovenhand over the last decade, he’s bounced among various American imprints—from the majors in the mid-’90s to weirdo outpost Alternative Tentacles, from the once-edgy and now-erstwhile Jetset to the Christian encampment Sounds Familyre. The movement stems, at least in part, from Edwards’ deliberate genre aggregation. Throughout his career, he’s mixed gospel and bluegrass, rocking both punk and gothic on a forever-sliding scale.
The most challenging element about Edwards’ place within the industry and with his potential audience, however, is his Christianity, which anchors the music he makes. His fire-and-brimstone religion, cast often in a King James Version non-vernacular, examines his faith and the way it can survive in a world of human error. It’s neither the cute stuff of former labelmates Sufjan Stevens and Danielson, nor does it possess the path-affirming promises of contemporary gospel; it’s brooding, soul-scraping stuff, like Michael Gira attempting to turn the other cheek.
Given the consistent religious content of Edwards’ music, you might find it surprising that Wovenhand’s seventh album, Refractory Obdurate, arrives under the aegis of Deathwish, the label co-founded by Converge frontman Jacob Bannon. Deathwish has been a diverse label for more than a decade, releasing the aberrant punk of Integrity, the electronic creep of Cold Cave, and the fetching post-hardcore of Touché Amoré. Now, Christian neo-folk, sung in a loamy baritone by a 46-year-old from Colorado's found a home on the label as well.
Refractory Obdurate is Edwards’ “heavy record”, with tumescent electric guitars and unforgiving drums, howled lines and massive codas. The album finally makes good on the post-punk and metal influences that have forever lingered at the edges of Wovenhand’s output. “Field of Hedon” lashes open like Sonic Youth in their concision-focused heyday. The remarkable anthem “Good Shepherd” feels like pop-punk, simply slowed and strengthen by the import of its own in excelsis proclamation. The saturated guitars that open “Hiss” even form a black metal feint. These fortified settings afford Edwards an urgency that his songs haven’t had in a decade. “This darkness does not want me/ It refuses to hold me,” he offers during the chorus of “Masonic Youth,” the newfound electricity actually dispatching with despair. It’s primal and powerful music, loaded and loud enough to demand that you—Christian or no—at least consider his case.
Edwards’ religion isn’t just central to the music he makes; in many respects, his religion—or at least his very cerebral and personal exploration of it—is the music he makes. “That’s the lens through which I see everything. It’s not something I just use to use,” he told his hometown newspaper four years ago. “I don’t know anything else.” His lyrics are lined with deep-reading references to scripture and the history that surrounds it; these 10 new tracks, for instance, mention the contested temptress Salome, use an euphemism for Satan to crack a joke, and speak of travelers from ancient Biblical lands as though they’re a stranger you’ve just met on the street.
Faith frames Edwards’ quest for justice and redemption, too, ideals he sees distorted by non-believers and self-proclaimed Christians alike. Refractory Obdurate often reads like an attempt to find and defend righteousness in a landscape that he believes is deadest on destroying it, and Edwards delivers all this with Pentecostal conviction, his voice decisive and stentorian, like a preacher gathering converts at a small-town, big-tent revival. Above the searing guitars of “King David,” he yells “Have you not read the story?” He pauses midsentence, a minister taking a moment to glare at and tacitly question ever member of his gathered congregation.
But Refractory Obdurate feels bigger than any belief system. In fact, despite its name, which essentially pairs two synonyms for the word stubborn, there is a remarkable, underlying plasticity at work here. Edwards backs the nascent electric surges with the same polyglot approach he’s embraced for two decades. “Obdurate Obscura” pairs Indian rhythms with Tuvan throat-singing, Arabic oud melodies and a smoldering background hum. “Salome” is a tempestuous epic, with a web of a half-dozen electric guitars and crisscrossed vocals shaping a foreboding thicket of sound. But Wovenhand’s progressions suggest a well-worn stack of West African records, and the bursts of gang vocals betray an interest in the kind of old American work songs Alan Lomax collected. Edwards and his supporting trio haven’t simply plugged in and turned up; rather, they’ve simply expanded the scope and shifted the balance of everything that’s long made Wovenhand’s music interesting. In the process, the re-energized Edwards is as good as he’s been years.
Edwards works through these songs with archaic words such as “doth” and religious references so specific that you’ll need to set aside some research time in order to parse the lyrical pieces. But he refers to his god as benevolent and beautiful, a passive leader who only enacts vengeance upon the wicked, those who “free the guilty for a bribe.” Edwards’ music is incredibly personal, his albums real-time workshops for thinking through some of the biggest questions of his life and, really, our history. He sees a world at fault and wants to find ways to remedy it, or at least to reconcile his hopes with reality. “This landscape is a thorn, from Tubal-Cain down to me,” Edwards sings at one point, invoking the Genesis character often credited with forging the first instruments of war. The world is a birthright of troubles, he implies, and these songs—now given the wonderful gumption of an electric edge—are simply his ways of dealing with them.
