Playlouder - Music is the Network

Seriously though, this is complete musical excellence. Sober alt. country with the good times removed and replaced with drip-fed drones, cellos located just outside your worst nightmares, and David Eugene Edwards, who barks and creaks like he's just walked out of Wisconsin Death Trip, has the sort of troubled moan that only suits his sort of thing. If you've ever listened to his former band Sixteen Horsepower, and thought, even with their swansong Folklore being one of the bleakest examples of American Folk recorded in recent years, and thought they could push the doom to eleven, here's your saviour. It's a lost more succinct, and more to the point than anything else they've committed to tape, and you know, even without 14 minute yammering covers of Ain't No Sunshine, which now look like forced efforts to diversify, rather than a welcome quarter of an hour of music.

To cut straight to the bone, the best tracks here are the opening number "This Beautiful Axe", which sounds a bit like Mosaic's masterwork Winter Shaker, only a bit more rancid, Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars, which sounds like a headless mannequin scarecrow show tune, and shoehorns in the chord sequence from Justice Aversion by Smog, Kicking Bird, which is an out-and-out no apologies death chant that would a snuff film shit itself, and sounds like the sort of thing Jeffrey Dhama treats himself to instead of Saturday Night Fever. It's such a exemplary entity of 21st century American Folk, a misbanded term given to any plank with a violin and a drum machine, for Woven Hand it's about taking the troubles back to the woods, and raging.  These three alone are worth the admission price. The curtain closes on an untitled final track, an instrumental drone that echoes a yokel Stars of the Lid, or someone sawing a cello in half, and brings peace to the valley once more. Any number of bad deep south metaphors could never do this justice. Imagine your own: buy this.