Sixteen Horsepower & Woven Hand

Within the landscape of 1990s roots-rock, which was crowded with hybrids and crossbreeds of every kind, the style of Sixteen Horsepower immediately stood out. They were Midwestern youngsters whose pedigree evoked the Louisiana bayou and the mountains of Colorado. They strummed in the manner of the “acid” folk-rock bands, yet always nodding to the sonic icons of rural traditions, largely thanks to David Eugene Edwards (languid steel-guitar chords, frenetic banjo picking, a few notes on the bandoneon), and they performed ballads of great passion that empathized with the human condition and the misfortunes of the downtrodden. Theirs was a kind of sincere, expansive music that at times conjured images of the Wild West and at others invited reflection on the future of humanity. Accompanying the hero were French drummer Jean-Yves Tola, a jazz graduate, and bassist Keven Soll.

Their first self-titled EP (1995, Ricochet), especially South Pennsylvania Waltz and Straight-Mouth Stomp, revealed a strong inclination toward the more arcane forms of country and blues, as well as toward more archaic instrumentation.

Sackcloth & Ashes (A&M, 1996) went much further, launching Edwards among the great bards of the tormented world of the defeated and the forgotten. The intense and measured style of small yet profound meditations on fate, such as See What I Saw and Scrawled In Sap, relies on the singer’s piercing lament and the nervous murmuring of the guitar. These are less songs than collective cries of pain, prayers and curses of primitive communities for whom the future has long ceased to exist. The dark melodrama Prison Shoe Romp perhaps marks the album’s deepest point of depression (both lyrical and sonic). The effect is even more moving when the most heart-rending elegy is paired with a driving, ramshackle waltz or polka figure on accordion, as in Harm’s Way and American Wheeze. It becomes downright devastating when, in Black Soul Choir and Heel On The Shovel, amid those bleak ruins of utter despair, while Edwards shouts with preacher-like fervor, the banjo launches into a galloping country & western. As the tension rises, so does the sense of the macabre, the stench of decay, the looming shadow of death.
The alternating of slow and fast rhythms benefits the album’s dynamics, lending an epic aura to the Calvary of the redeemer Edwards.
Edwards writes possessed lyrics worthy of Nick Cave and sings them with the spirit of a Jeffrey Lee Pierce (Gun Club) who has shed punk robes and donned the overalls of an Appalachian farmer. His work is one colossal requiem.

David Eugene Edwards returns with Low Estate (A&M, 1997), another collection of rural elegies, this time joined by Jeffrey Paul, who alternates on violin, guitar, and organ. This album too can be considered a concept work. All the songs are set in the tones of the most macabre spirituals, from Brimstone Rock, a kind of blues vibrating on banjo strings and rising furiously over guitar riffs, to Golden Rope, the bleakest lament, miraculously coagulating into a majestic waltz.
The orchestrations of these moral tragedies are masterful. The band descends into hell for the funeral march of Low Estate, pierced by the laments of organ, violin, accordion, xylophone, and piano. Edwards’ voice solemnly declaims For Heaven’s Sake, heedless of the cutting fuzztone and guitar feedback and chased by the gallop of the rhythm section. The melody of Phyllis Ruth barely exists, but the instruments enter one by one, and the wall of chords they construct is worth more than a chorus. The tension is always at its peak, thanks to the leader’s impassioned crooning and a suspense calculated down to the smallest detail. Tracks like Dead Run live mainly on Edwards’ emphatic baritone, just a step away from the most unhinged Nick Cave. Pure Clob Road goes even further, with an uninterrupted delirium over a frantic mass of accordions.
Shaking the album out of its torpor are a couple of lively interludes: the frenzied quadrille of My Narrow Mind, the lurching country & western of Ditch Digger, and the comic drinking song Hang My Teeth On Your Door, performed as if by a group of drunken saloon patrons. Yet even these more traditional pieces violate tradition in countless ways. Everything that matters is performed either over the top or between the lines. There is nothing literal in this music.
Edwards is something like the Nick Cave of American country-rock, a possessed preacher desperately searching for redemption. What he does to blues and country recalls the work of the Gun Club, but without the punk-rock emphasis.

The music on Secret South (Glitterhouse, 2000 - Alternative Tentacles, 2009) is so old-fashioned that sometimes (Praying Arm Lane, Straw Foot) it feels like they are playing covers (and in a couple of cases they are). But what they lack in style, they may be gaining in emotional depth: the stately, martial as well as neurotic Clogger (worthy of Stan Ridgway and Warren Zevon), the litany Silver Saddle (that blends Spanish melody and Indian droning), and the ballads (the piano-based Burning Bush, the vibrant Splinters) are impregnated with the fatal tone of noir cinema. The drawback of the album is that it is a bit too pensive and austere for its own sake.

Hoarse (Checkered Past, 2001) is a live album.

Woven Hand (Glitterhouse, 2002) debuted David-Eugene Edwards' alter ego. The songs composed a haunting journey through the lands of John Cale and Nick Cave that easily dwarfed the Sixteen Horsepower's recent album.
My Russia sounds like a bluesy version of Leonard Cohen's spectral odes. The emotional core of the project lies in the breezy folkish of Wooden Brother, in the emphatic The Good Hand, the agonizing Story and Pictures, down to the introverted Pail Blue Fever and the claustrophobic Your Russia. Edwards excels at crafting disturbing atmospheres. Musically, the most lively ideas are to be found in the locomotive-boogie of Glass Eye and the Celtic-tinged Arrow Head.

Blush Music (Glitterhouse, 2003), a theater piece, was more avantgarde.

Consider The Birds (Soundsfamilyre, 2004) continued Woven Hand's dark journey into the psyche but with mixed results. Sparrow Falls and The Speaking Hands are emphatic for the sake of being emphatic, and end up sounding a bit verbose, but the slow piano pace and guitar reverbs of Bleary Eyed Duty evoke voodoo rituals, while Edwards sings in a shamanic register a` la Doors's Jim Morrison. The solemn melody of Oil On Panel strives to achieve an epic dimension, but it is the multi-layered rhythm of To Make A Ring that creates the most powerful atmosphere, and it is the surreal and underdeveloped Tin Finger that captures the imagination, followed by the spartan and anemic closer Into The Piano for pianola, found voices and little more. The feeling is that Edwards tried a bit too hard to craft songs based on the sound without adequate melodies or arrangements.

Sixteen Horsepower's Folklore (JetSet, 2002) is chamber music for an existential thriller. The playing is impeccable and the arrangements are tasteful. Unfortunately, it contains mostly covers.

Lilium, i.e. bassist Pascal Humbert, released the all-instrumental album Transmission Of All The Goodbyes (Glitterhouse, 2000 - Smooch, 2005), that collects home recordings of the previous decade and introduces an evocative and psychedelic folk sound in the vein of Souled American and Calexico; and especially Short Stories (Twist & Shout, 2003 - Smooch, 2005), a group-oriented effort (this time fronted by a vocalist, the raspy Kal Calhoone) that used the same kind of gloomy ambience (Calexico, Black Heart Procession) to pen intense existential ballads.

Woven Hand, aka David Edwards, achieved a tragic synthesis of sorts of all its influences on Mosaic (Sounds Familyre, 2006), another bleak fresco of the contemporary world highlighted by a calm mastery of the folk tradition and by a tormented brand of existential mysticism. Edwards work his way through magic/gothic atmospheres with terrifying elegance: Winter Shaker sets his Nick Cave-esque declamation in a field of eerie electronica and exotic dance; Elktooth drops his damned lament into a percussive inferno; Little Raven mixes a naive carillon and a psychedelic shamanic invocation; and the six-minute Slota Prow - Full Armour abandons any pretense of song and sets in motion a suspenseful chamber drama that towards the end segues into a flute-driven hard-rocking voodoo dance (Full Armour).
At the same time Edwards' "scenic" skills are at their best. The solemn threnody Swedish Purse contrasts an undulating church organ and a tinkling mandolin, i.e. the somber ambience of a monastery and the lively spirit of a folk dance, and ends up sounding like a male version of Nico. Twig is the soundtrack for a Freudian nightmare, a condensed and twisted version of the Doors's The End. while in the poignant elegies Whistling Girl and Truly Golden he sounds like a colloquial version of Van Morrison or Bruce Springsteen. The brief instrumental Bible And Bird blends the spiritual element of gospel music and the populist element of country music, and perhaps best represents his philosophical viewpoint. The pathos of Edwards' odyssey peaks with the driving Bob Dylan-esque apocalypse of Dirty Blue, that incorporates Slavic dance and anthemic singalong.
Edwards never misses a step and rarely uses more instruments than needed.

Edwards' booming croon had acquired the apocalyptic quality of the gospel preachers of the Far West on Ten Stones (Sounds Familyre, 2008). Generally speaking, the album displays a more aggressive stance, starting with the whipping guitar riffs of The Beautiful Axe. The album maintains an emotional and sonic core centered around the pounding and dissonant boogie White Knuckle Grip and the frenzied madcap hoedown Kicking Bird. Cohawkin Road embodies much of the spirit of Wovenhand's music, but it is one of the exceptions to the rule, a cross between Ennio Morricone's atmospheric soundtracks and Bruce Springsteen's aching meditations. Another "soft" moment comes with the stately psychedelic chant His Loyal Love. On the other hand, poignant songs like Kingdom Of Ice, Horsetail and Not One Stone do not retain the spontaneous horror of Mosaic Instead they try to involve and engage by piling up hard and loud sounds. In other words, it sounded like the continuation of Consider The Birds.

The Threshingfloor (Sounds Familyre, 2010) was perhaps Wovenhand's most eclectic album, with songs ranging from the poignant and forceful The Threshingfloor to the gloomy Raise Her Hands, from the touching acoustic ballad Singing Grass, to the garage anthem Denver City.

All the lyrics of all Wovenhand records yet were collected in the 110-page book "Black of the Ink", illustrated by David Eugene Edwards.

Edwards' vocal register continued to morph from the tone of the manic preachers to the tone of the angst-ridden rockabilly singer. The Laughing Stalk (2012), produced by Alexander Hacke (Einsturzende Neubauten) boasts an eerie and propulsive sound, thanks mainly to Ordy Garrison's tribal drumming. Hence the U2-esque bombast In the Temple and Chuck French imitating Neil Young's thundering guitar riffs in King O King, with As Wool borderin on pop-metal. But there is also a lot of doom and gloom. Long Horn echoes the moody punk-pop of Soul Asylum and the gothic punk-rock of Gun Club, while the haunting The Laughing Stalk and Maize would have been fashionable during the dark-punk of the 1980s (Joy Division's generation) and Glistening Black even mimics the Sisters Of Mercy. The religious lyrics are the price to pay for listening to some classy stylish jamming.

Refractory Obdurate (Deathwish, 2014), that adds Neil Keener's heavy-metal bass lines to an already granitic combo, tries a bit too hard to sound aggressive, with echoes of Nick Cave's psychodrama's in songs like Masonic Youth; and the distorted vocals in songs like The Refractory end up evoking Jethro Tull's Aqualung. The garage rave-up of Field of Hedon is a lone exception of truly ferocious playing. The energy in fact collapses in the synth-tinged Salome and in the closing gothic/exotic dirge El-bow.

There is little to salvage on Star Treatment (2016), a rather lazy repetition of their most common styles and themes, from echoes of the most propulsive Nick Cave sermons (Come Brave) to echoes of U2 (All Your Waves). The waltzing elegy Golden Blossom and the closing anthem Low Twelve are the melodic peaks; but, again, the highlight is a psychobilly, The Hired Hand, the rare shock of adrenaline within a sleepy album.

Silver Sash (2022) is surprisingly devoid of passion.