Friday Full-Length: Wovenhand, The Threshingfloor
Posted in Bootleg Theater on December 11th, 2020 by JJ KoczanThere’s a kind of freedom in writing when I know a given post is going to get a minimal response. A kind of safety that lets me imagine I’m speaking to myself rather than addressing an audience. Some “me” versus some “you,” both little more than vague ideas perpetuated by digital distance. Nobody cares when I write about Wovenhand. They’re one of those bands. I have a list of them. So yeah. Maybe I’ll talk to myself for a little bit to close out the week instead of doing the normal thing.
I still remember where I was when I first wrote about The Threshingfloor. Wovenhand’s sixth album, it was released in 2010 through Sounds Familyre and Glitterhouse Records — the latter covering Europe — and I was in a public library in or near Ludlow, Vermont. The Patient Mrs. and I had rented a cabin up that way on someone’s property for a month as a kind of escape-from-Jersey getaway. We had to open the glass door to let in the internet from the main house on the property. One night she made a mac and cheese that was too spicy to eat. We drank Switchback ale on tap at the bar down the road, and I wrote more in that time than I think I’d ever written anytime before or have written anytime since. We slept, we woke, we wrote. She worked on her Ph.D. dissertation, I wrote the stories that would become my Master’s thesis, and later, that book I put out a few years ago. By any measure, it was a beautiful stretch of a beautiful, unemployed summer.
The Threshingfloor was new. As it happened I traveled south a few times over the month to go to band practice — the band would break up later that year mostly because I’m an asshole; so it goes — and I bought the CD at the now-defunct Other Music in Manhattan. Did I see there’s a new documentary about the store? I think so. It was a cool spot. I don’t remember but according to that old post I’d looked in a few other stores with no success, but Other Music came through. Fair enough.
The album is brilliant. There’s little in the David Eugene Edwards-led outfit’s catalog to take the place in my heart held by their 2002 self-titled debut (discussed here), with Edwards fresh out of 16 Horsepower and bleeding that band’s traditional folk into an experimentalism that helped spread both the actual gospel and that of neo-folk in and beyond the aughts. The Threshingfloor is a landmark for how it engaged with an expanded definition of sonic and atmospheric weight, how the strings and ringing melody of “Singing Grass” became heavy despite a still-gentle impact, and how Edwards’ richly creative arrangements gave nuance to the material ahead of the mid-’90s acoustic rocker “Denver City” at the finish.
These are impulses Edwards has continued to explore. The Native American
language that shows up in “The Threshingfloor” itself can also be heard in Edwards’ recent collaborative single with Carpenter Brut, “Fab Tool” (posted here), and Wovenhand’s three LPs since The Threshingfloor — 2012’s The Laughing Stalk (review here), 2014’s Refractory Obdurate (review here) and 2016’s Star Treatment (review here) — have pushed further toward aural heft. The band resides in a few places between. They’re too folk for heavy heads, too heavy for the jam circuit, too Christian for the non-Christians, too weird to be pop or Christian rock, and so on. In terms of genre, they’ve kind of made it up as they’ve gone along. Fine.
Sunshine was coming through the windows of the library that I’m sure have grown taller in my mind in the decade since, and the table and chairs I sat on were made of a dark wood. I don’t actually remember that — they could’ve been particle board for all I know — but it’s my story, so let’s go with cherry or something like that. The floor had a municipal rug that smelled of recently-vacuumed dust and, though not new, was neither completely worn, though the paths to the bookshelves could be seen like prints waiting to be chased. I had headphones on — my old Bose noise-cancelers that broke a few years after this — and the portable CD player that came with them. I carried CDs around with me in an old typewriter case garnered from the closet at The Aquarian when I worked there. I’d packed it full because there was a lot of music I couldn’t live without for that month, and I had a moral objection to the restrictive nature of iPods, iTunes, etc. There was a righteousness to consider.
On headphones, The Threshingfloor remains sweeping and extreme in its own peculiar way. To someone taking it on for the first time, its arrangements can seem obtuse, because they are, but ultimately I’m of the mindset that it matters less what’s making the sound so much as what’s the sound being made. At least some of it, as I recall from the one time I interviewed Edwards — I can’t remember if it was for this record or 2008’s Ten Stones — was found folk instruments in different countries picked up on tour. That accounts for some of the flute sounds, various guitar-ish things here and there in the material, with Edwards’ voice and unique vocal cadence serving as the unifying factor, let alone the songwriting.
I guess this record’s been on my mind, and definitely some escapism behind that. Thinking about writing about it that warm day — the nights were cool in that cabin — and all that writing, it would be hard not to be nostalgic for it. It’s been a rough few weeks. I cut off my hair and beard to see what I looked like underneath and I’ve found myself looking older, fatter and more miserable, all of which I am. My disappointment with myself seems to leak through my pores like sweat. I exude it like my dead father used to. I am tired and I see no point to anything. I lose patience. When my son whines, I whine back at him. I just try to scratch through my day minute by minute so that I can go back to bed at the end of it. I just want the day to end.
Self-loathing is a comfortable traveling companion. It’s been with me as long as I’ve had the capacity to carry it. How familiar. Always there. How reliable.
What is the point of anything anymore? It’s laughably melodramatic, but I have been struggling to answer this question. What is the point of doing this? What is it that’s keeping me going with this project? This. Right here. What am I doing this for? All the fretting, all the time, all the bullshit, all the vague transactional garbage. My position on keeping this site going is that I won’t make any decisions until after live music returns — not a minor consideration even as regards The Threshingfloor, since Wovenhand’s performance at Roadburn 2011 was one of the most incredible shows I’ve ever seen — but what if it doesn’t come back? Without that, why do I need this in my life? What if I didn’t have it? After nearly 12 years, am I really so afraid to find out what might be next? Am I really so weak and cloying a person? Does my ego, my narcissism really need to be glutted by my own delusions of relevance? What the fuck am I doing and what the fuck have I done?
12 years later, what have I said?
Great and safe weekend. Drink water.
them, is part of what ties the material together, though one shouldn’t discount Edwards‘ voice in that either. He is the central figure across the entire span of the record, with his compressed voice in the verses of “Glass Eye” — on stage he uses two mics — and self-harmonizing on the joyous “Arrowhead.” That track begins with a sample of a grandmotherly-sounding woman talking about going to grade school for an immediate tap into nostalgia, so Edwards isn’t necessarily the only presence throughout the entire album, but for plenty of it he remains the focal point, whether it’s the gospel resounding of “Story and Pictures” or the interwoven layering in “My Russia” earlier on. Working with Daniel McMahon and Stephen Taylor on the recording, he’s nonetheless more than up to the task of carrying the songs.
