My review
Wovenhand - Slver Sash
Twenty fingers, two hands, a house and a project that has developed the creativity of two souls facing each other.
No distances to be shortened, no mediations to be found, but a sowing of seeds, each with their own intention, making the ground (the songs) the point where to find a goal and fix a start, made of corrections and reinterpretations.
David Eugene Edwards and Chuck French are two colts without saddle or bridle, two inhabitants of the art world who, with decidedly different projects, have created energy and made it immortal in these 9 new compositions.
The mysticism of Wovenhand is combined with the intense rock side of Planes Mistaken For Stars, of which Chuck French was guitarist and bassist and who also sang with the US band.
An album full of tension, a single body with nine arms, drawing black smiles with poisoned teeth, with lyrics that like raw gold deserve respect and bows.
A work which turns out to be very different from what we are used to hearing to, a race inside the United States whose face David has always wanted to try to sketch with brushstrokes between stories and truths perfectly embraced and connected. Now everything becomes more bloody and determined, with guitars which know steel, tribal drumming and incandescent words to give us the impression that everything resembles a marking of time with bitterness and a sense of strong conviction that we are already inside a universal judgment which shakes the souls.
A rock side that sounds like a sentence, a sonic earthquake which lands on our losses.
And in the four years it took to be released, the ninth Wovenhand album seems to be a lightning bolt that rips apart everything that had been deposited inside our convictions, showing us a band as if it had been kidnapped from itself to keep its distance from its past.
It's a deep emotion to repeat the listening: everything becomes more lucid and full of consciousnesses that dismantle every hypothesis of happiness, the skin turns out to be heavy and dirty, stained by a propensity towards catastrophe more and more conscious and able to intoxicate every hope, making us wait.
Everything suggests that what is expressed is a leave-taking from the trust in the human being, with Edward's magnetic voice inserted inside the dust, which seems to be distant but instead pulses tremendously to make us slaves, the only point of contact with respect is its being often doubled.
The mix of which Silver Sash is composed travels through an almost unrecognisable neofolk, rock with a black cape, correct and rude punk that spits on its past, hinted and camouflaged Stoner Rock, an Alternative so wide that it mocks its identity, to finally glide to a folk noir almost unrecognisable but present, because you just have to widen the pupils of your ears and you will find it.
No doubt it's a theatrical performance that moves us but makes us aware. And an infinite applause will make it eternal.
Song by song
Tempel Timber
An opening that could be deceptive: something from the past here seems to suggest a certain continuity, in reality everything already clashes, an almost veiled feedback lies on the rough, slow but thunderous skin that catches fire. Guitars like rips, chimes to lead us into the gothic American temple.
Acacia
On the theatre stage, initial camouflaged post-rock gives way to electrified and robust neo-folk, in the rush of sheets of metal like swarms without control, with chords that twist to a bare-chested bass, then a dry solo that smells of the 70's to complete the new blow of the sabre.
Duat Hawk
The album's lead single travels within the boundaries we already knew well from 16 Horsepower and then Wovenhand themselves. But everything becomes more choral and disturbing: if on one hand we enjoy a listening close to comfort and a certain dose certainly more catchy, on the other hand the sadness makes us unable to enjoy a musical texture that here is yes closer to what we know, but certainly more terrible and definitive.
Dead Beat
The second excerpt of the album is pure adrenaline, it's an invitation to surrender, Edward's voice convinces us to leave any sense of reason and leads us into the powerful drumming, absorbing us.
Omaha
Almost as if, in a way, the cliché of the previous song was repeated, we enter even more into a purification rite that, starting from abrasive guitars, ends up in powerful drumming, even if it knows how to stop to give space to the electric wounds.
Sicagnu
The frenzy is confirmed by this sacred and mystic wave, the dilation of heaviness that through a drumming which beats our skin ends up in almost metal guitars. Then comes the musical lull but Edward knows how to hold our breath with his maximum ability to evoke his glorious past with a suggestive finale.
The Lash
The Lash shows the splinters of the storm we just experienced with the first 6 songs and takes us into a sonic middle age, everything becomes tragedy.
8 of 9
Absolute masterpiece, centre of gravity of the album, a classy performance that gives us the shivers with the screeching of oblique and evil guitars, and then everything opens up into the atomic cloud that turns us off, weeping. And it's trauma, time as the sentence of an announced defeat, the song that in the central night becomes fading thunder, and then ends its breath in our now heavy arms.
Silver Sash
Electronic pulses, everything suspended and tense, the end of the album is entrusted to a slow kick that breaks our teeth, remnants of sounds that slowly condense to drive us out from that hiding place in which we were forced to take refuge. Wovenhand discovers and kills us, slowly, with enormous class...
Alex Dematteis
Musicshockworld
4th February 2022
