Wovenhand - Ten Stones

Another band that I've discovered just in the past couple of years. I'd love to see this guy live but so far he hasn't wandered out far enough into the wilderness to wind up in my neighborhood. I have a feeling I'd enjoy meeting him.





~~ originally posted March 29, 2008 at ProgArchives.com ~~

Religion is a strange thing; many resist, youth rebel against, and millions deny. Yet the vast majority of the world claim one religion or another as their own. We mark time with a calendar that separates human epochs based on the birth of a religious figure that many reject. Long-formed traditions in nearly every culture have their roots in religious beliefs or superstitions, even those where the origins have been clouded by history. Wars are fought, buildings blown apart, nations and peoples laid bare; lives are defined and sometimes made forfeit all in the name of religion. Words and names mouthed as holy by some are uttered as profane by others, and both hate the other as a result. We live on a planet full of men where it is written both were formed by an all-knowing and infinitely powerful creator, yet disease and poverty and despair abound. Holy books are filled with tales of punishment, retribution, trials and a coming apocalyptic climax, and sometimes include incidents of the most horrific depravity that should cause rational-thinking people to recoil in disgust and fear. And in the end all religion is based on an expression of faith; though not always on hope, which the ancient Greeks (perhaps wisely) considered the most powerful of evils loosed from Pandora’s Box. Nietzsche declared hope to be the cruelest of emotions because of its power to prolong the miseries which of necessity must be present for hope to have any authority.

It’s all a very messy business.

David Eugene Edwards recognizes the interlaced contradictions and darkness that blanket this place we call home, and doesn’t shy away from the view. Wovenhand music has always chronicled the journey of The Struggle, both with poignancy and often wanton despair, this latest album more so than any prior. And while hope may offer
little comfort or relief, neither does despair engulf the listener. It is what it is, nothing more, and certainly nothing less. Weak and timid souls need not apply.

The album explodes with torrid guitar blasts and a fervent drumbeat on “The Beautiful Axe” (the Blood Axe?), another lyrically disjointed yet poetic gaze to heaven written by Edwards; piously declaring “To the humble He has given grace, from the proud He hides his face” and following with an almost gleefully fatalistic chant of “Joy has come in the mind that I see - beautiful the axe that flies at me”. Wovenhand seem to have abandoned any pretense of docile Americana folk as Edwards channels generations of whiskey-breathed and grizzled tent-revival evangelists who stoked the fear-inspired Christian principles that evolved across Middle America between the ages of post-Civil War carpetbaggers and the free-form Chautauqua movements of the early twentieth century. Nine or ten more like this one and Southern blood would boil in righteous indignation and rail against a world of depravity and evil intention.

But a basic tenant of those same homespun Ameri-Christian principles is humility, finding its genesis in biblical proverbs such as “every proud man is an abomination to the Lord; I assure you that he will not go unpunished”; and “if you have foolishly been proud or presumptuous, put your hand on your mouth; for the stirring of milk brings forth curds, and the stirring of anger brings forth blood”. “Horsetail” expands on this theme amid a jangling, almost country guitar riff and the dire warning “if you think you can see it in your hand then you are blind; He brings the whirlwind to scatter your fire - you cannot reach Him, no - not from your tallest spire”. Maxims to live by, courtesy a band of scruffy and tattooed post-grunge rockers.

As with any proper Christian-themed record there must be a rapturous, apocalyptic song, and “Not One Stone” delivers that for this album. Edwards describes the final act in which the chosen one returns to exact vengeance and deliver holy justice on this thing He once created. Everything will be laid waste says the holy book; not one stone will remain atop another:

“On my way down this weary melody ends; the host of heaven descends, down beneath this bleeding ground - behold the lamb”

But Edwards is a red-blooded American at heart, sometimes even more so than he is a wild-eyed rural evangelist, and has a tendency to wander thematically with his music on occasion. Some of his best work has been odd covers and musical landscapes of dusty roads and dry fields cracked with the rise of too many hot suns. He is guilty of both indulgences on this record, starting with the undecipherable yet maudlin lyrics, bleak piano and rambling acoustic guitar on “Cohawkin Road” and “Iron Feather”. While I’ve no idea what these songs are about the return of piano, strings and other acoustic instruments recall his earliest work with both 16 Horsepower and this band, and are in the finest Americana tradition of Springsteen’s ‘Nebraska’, Mellencamp's ‘Rough Harvest’ and most everything Tom Waits ever recorded. Best listened to driving down a desolate country road in a rusted-out Oldsmobile on a dry autumn evening.

That Appalachian country swagger and guttural Jim Carroll-like worldliness seen on earlier Wovenhand albums rear their head again in the form of a weekend night wild ride on “White Knuckle Grip”, a sauntering good-old-boy urban cowboy musical cruise along dark and foreboding streets of trouble and whiskey philosophy. Strange change of pace for this album, but probably not so strange considering the juxtaposition of faith and fallow lives this band so comfortably embraces.

Like I said before, Edwards’ other penchant is toward seminal cover tunes, including the Bill Withers R&B classic “Ain’t no Sunshine” on the band’s debut album; and John Fogerty’s “Bad Moon Rising” and Joy Division’s “Day of the Lords” with 16 Horsepower. On this album Edwards adopts the late A.C. Jobim’s bossa nova
standard “Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars” (“Corcovado”) as his own, a song that has been recorded by everyone from Miles Davis to Cliff Richard to Queen Latifah. Under Edwards’ supervision the tune takes on the semblance of a morbid, almost fatalistic existential lament. Possibly one of the weirdest and most disturbing jazz covers ever recorded.

The band reflect their mountain Western roots with the rollicking, almost post-punk wailing tribute to the old Kiowa Native American chief Kicking Bird on the song of the same name. An interesting figure to honor, as Kicking Bird was widely derided by follow Indians back in the 19th century as he became one of the first to treaty with the U.S. government, only to see the treaty broken and his people herded into Oklahoma reservations far from their ancestral mountain home; and himself dead at the suspected hand of a saboteur from his own race.

More of the acoustic punk-meets-bluegrass dirge that landed 16 Horsepower the label of ‘goth-country’ on the angry and stark “Kingdom of Ice”, another heavily acoustic song with sarcastic overtones on the false sense of power and control over nature and self-determination exhibited by modern man.

The band brings things home to roost with the peaceful, eagle-soaring-across-a-mountain-range “His Loyal Love”, written by band bassist Pascal Humbert and sounding all the world like a nature hymn sung in an open meadow. A peaceful ending to a raucous and otherwise disturbing album. The band adds a short flourish with an instrumental soundscape to close things out.

As an American who has lived through the high point of our landing men on the Moon and finding a cure for polio, to the current state of watching a once great nation possibly wheezing out its death throes caused by decades of excess, hubris and arrogance; I sometimes feel that there is little tolerance or interest in exploring and reflecting on the generations of experiences that brought us to where we are. But it is important to do so nonetheless, and also important (as is the case with any peoples) to understand the elements that make up one’s whole. Wovenhand have moved beyond the pale of traditional Americana music to a new place that is both frightening and morbidly fascinating: one can’t help but be drawn in and repulsed at the same time. Anything that can cause such powerful emotions must be considered an experience worth having, for the enlightenment it brings if nothing else. This is not a musical masterpiece, but it is an essential tapestry of a conflicted and complex people who continue to grow, thrive and survive despite all odds (and possibly even despite natural order and justice). Like I said, it is what it is, so enjoy the show.

peace

Cerberus Shoal - The Land We All Believe In

More cool stuff from back East. These guys all met at college in Massachussetts some years ago and formed Cerberus Shoal.
Eventually some of them would leave to form the current Americana alt.acid folk band Fire on Fire, but just before that they pumped out one more CD as Cerberus Shoal. Unlike their previous efforts, which were all over the place musically, this one is an awful lot like what Fire on Fire would end up sounding like. I've read they started out as a punk band, morphing quickly into a sort of avant-garde post-rock collective who seemed to change like chameleons every couple of years or so. The band also has several collaborations to their credit, none of which are really worth seeking out frankly. This is by far my favorite album from the band.

~~ originally posted December 10, 2008 at ProgArchives.com ~~

I seem to have gotten really obsessed with Cerberus Shoal of late. I mean, like getting on a bus and going to Maine and stalking them obsessed. Every seen that movie ‘What About Bob”? Kind of like that.


Nah, not really. I probably should erase that before posting this review or they might get a restraining order or something. Hopefully not, I’m not really a nut case. But I do love this album, having come upon it (and the band) sort of backwards via Caleb Mulkerin and Colleen Kinsella’s later work with Big Blood and their newly-released album as Fire on Fire. Pick that one up if you’re into carefully constructed chaos posing as post-punk Americana folk by the way; you’ll be glad you did.

Cerberus Shoal seem to be something of a hidden treasure as far as progressive / indie music goes. I guess they are no more since Kinsella and Mulkerin have moved on to the whole Fire on Fire thing. But during the band’s ten or so years of existence they managed to crank out a dozen albums as well as any number of collaborations and odd side projects. Pretty prolific for a group that doesn’t seem to have any central thematic compass or even definable style. I’ve read their roots were in punk, although you certainly wouldn’t discern that from anything I’ve heard of theirs. The stuff is kind of hard to find too, since most of it is out-of-print or only available from side-street vendors. I managed to pick this one and a few others up for not much more than the cost of postage from various Amazon resellers. This one cost me all of $4 USD plus shipping, brand new. Great deal – too bad the band probably made little to nothing off the sale. Maybe I’ll send them a Christmas card or something.

Their earlier work seems to start off as more like loosely organized post-rock, but eventually they discover horns and accordions and stuff, and you can’t call it post-rock if there are horns and squeeze boxes. Efrim Menuck would never stand for that sort of thing.

But eventually the band apparently made their way from the Boston avant-garde scene to their current digs in Maine, and their sound evolved into something much more acoustic, a bit more grounded in social and cultural themes, and heavily imbued with folk and indeterminable ethnic tones. I would as easily believe they are a bunch of first-generation Iron Curtain immigrants as former music-school students from New England.

This particular album captures the band in the latter stages of their transition to an earthy folk act, not of the Devendra Banhart neo-folk family, but closer to the Larkin Grimm mold. In fact, several members guest on Grimm’s latest album ‘Parplar’ under their current handle Fire on Fire.

Anyhoo, the music is pretty interesting stuff, even if the band does manage to almost screw everything up by interrupting a romping folk chant with a really cheesy piece of spoken-word pseudo-goth thing in the middle of “The Ghosts are Greedy” that sounds like an acoustic, laid-back version of Abiogenesi with a vaguely Canadian accent. Oh well, I guess there’s a reason these guys aren’t on the Billboard charts.

No matter, the rest of the album more than makes up for this faux pas, and that’s what the skip button on a CD player was made for anyway. The title track sounds very much like the acoustic folksy stuff the Fire on Fire is currently doing, with Kinsella’s borderline falsetto and slightly trembling vocals adding just the right touch of both grit and charm. I’ve no idea what they’re rambling on about, and the liner notes are about as unorganized as the band appears to be on their youTube videos. But the trappings belie a carefully constructed arrangement of acoustic strings, percussion (including some sort of unidentifiable bell-type thingies) and what sounds like maybe a banjo. I’m guessing there’s a left- leaning political message here if you really want to dig, but I’m cool with just kicking back and enjoying the ambience of the music myself.

Next up is “Wyrm”, a sort of weird blend of folk, calypso, Latin groove and mildly-hypnotic rhythm combined with bassist Chriss Sutherland’s (at least I think it’s his) vocals babbling on in a made-up dialect that also makes no sense, but once again I could care less. After a while the band reverts back a bit to their post-rock and mild drone days with an extended instrumental break that doesn’t do much but kind of wander along aimlessly, before kicking back into the gibberish-and-rhythm groove to bring the song to a close. It’s not ‘Thick as a Brick’, but I’m left feeling a little more cheerful in a world where there’s too little of that so the time is well-spent.

After a predictably goofy and strange “Pie for the President” that makes about as much sense as the title, and the aforementioned “The Ghosts are Greedy” things pick up considerably. The last half-hour of the album consists of two tracks (“Junior” and “Taking out the Enemy”), both lumbering, unhurried with relatively simple arrangements and melodic stretches interrupted at odd intervals by moody transitions and well-constructed two and three part vocal passages. “Taking out the Enemy” adds a chorus of pretty much the whole band chanting “here I am; here I am – sending out aeroplanes” with a three-syllable enunciation of “aeroplanes” that’s really catchy and makes the song work very well as a comforting closing to an overall easy to enjoy hour of music.

I can’t say as Cerberus Shoal are the next coming of modern progressive music; in fact, the key members of the band have since moved on to a sound that regresses from this transitional record to their next incarnation that is even more primitive and vaguely timeless than this one manages to be. But in the end I seem to have developed a soft and somewhat sentimental spot in my music consciousness and my Zen player for a record that has to be appreciated for its reverent respect for the craft of music if nothing else. And that is something worth acknowledging indeed. Thanks to these musicians for staying their course despite the lack of broad recognition or fame – you have one devoted fan at least. Four stars.

peace

Ruby Throat

KatieJane Garside has always been an enigmatic character, from the days she fronted and then abandoned 90s cabaret-goth rockers Daisy Chainsaw right up to recent years that found her engaged in performance and photograph exhibits as a scantily (and sometimes un-) clad punk waif. In her Chainsaw days Garside may have inspired later antics the likes of Britney Spears and Courtney Love with her penchant for shock visuals including head shaving, face-smeared makeup and sometimes barely coherent stage performances. This latest incarnation of the lovely but possibly disturbed Garside is just as hard to get your head around, but may finally capture the true strength of her tender demons.

Ruby Throat displays a completely different, and disarmingly seductive, view of Garside’s inner psych; namely, a slow, sparse and largely acoustic setting that emphasizes her innate and undeniable vocal talent, backed by just enough of an instrumental tapestry to keep the experience from being labeled ‘for adults only’.

At her finest Garside has the ability to carry a tune dripping with dulcet tones and a homing pigeon-like sense of musical direction that can cause healthy males (and probably some females) to look around furtively just to make sure nobody in viewing distance is casting disapproving puritanical glares their way. This woman oozes sensuality from every pore; hence the name of ‘Ruby Throat’, I suppose.

The backing instrumentation varies from barely perceptible (“John 3:16”) to a sort of spaghetti-western bluesy funk (“Dear Daniel”) to the title track that plucks out acoustic guitar chords accented with harmonic interludes and the occasional barely-controlled soprano wail.

The mood doesn’t vary all that much from track to track, but after a while that doesn’t seem to matter as Garside draws the listener in with her hypnotic crooning and chillingly personal vignettes centered on relationships, tattered lives and dilapidated soundscapes. It’s a long way from her days of power chords and self-destructive antics, but perhaps that’s the point. KatieJane and co-conspirator Chris Wittingham have created something delicate, soothing and profoundly personal with Ruby Throat’s ‘The Ventriloquist’; one can only hope Garside herself has found the kind of inner peace her words and voice project in these songs.

Highly recommended.

peace

Alina Simone

Okay, I'll admit to being just a bit smitten with Ms. Simone and her music lately. In particular her latest album "Everyone is Crying out to me, Beware". That's not her picture on the cover BTW; it is a picture of the late Russian punk-folk poet and musician Yanka Dyagileva, who drowned under mysterious circumstances in 1991. At the time of her death none of her substantial body of work had ever been officially released, although since then some of her music has been remastered and released in various forms. Most of it is still hard to find, although if you click here you can download a lot of her songs (legally I believe, although it will help if you know a little Russian).

What I find most interesting about Ms. Simone's interpretations is that she takes what are mostly rather raw, punk-leaning tunes and turns them into really gorgeous folk songs with tasteful instrumentation and just the right touch of emotion. Okay, at times Simone goes a bit over-the-top, but that's okay as far as I'm concerned. She captures something infinitely mournful and yet beautiful about Yanka's music on this album, and I recommend it very highly to anyone who is interested in contemporary Russian music, or just folk songs with well-orchestrated arrangements.

I was so taken by her singing that I bought two of her other CDs, 'prettier in the dark' and 'placelessness' (both labeled in lower-case on the artwork so I'm listing them that way here as well). These aren't quite as wonderful as 'Everyone..', but Ms. Simone has a very comfortable and appealing voice so you'll probably enjoy her singing anyway. I think I read somewhere she's working on some Britney Spears covers; can't wait to hear what that sounds like [LOL].

One more plus for Ms. Simone: I sent her an email to let her know I had bought her Yanka CD and loved it. She replied the very next day, which I thought was pretty cool.

One last thing - all the songs on 'Everyone..' are sung in Russian, but really that won't put you off at all - it's the arrangements and Ms. Simone's voice that carry this music anyway.

Some of the songs below are from that album; the rest are mostly from her other two albums. I would particularly recommend "Half of my Kingdom" (love the horns!).

Enjoy!