The Laughing Stalk

Time hasn't mellowed the bracing spiritual vision of Woven Hand’s David Eugene Edwards. If anything, the alt-country rocker’s music has grown more aggressive and obsessive with the years, as evidenced by his band’s fifth album, The Laughing Stalk. Edwards has one of the great prophetic voices in pop music, fueled by a fiery Christian faith. Rather than delivering messages of easy salvation, Woven Hand serve up scriptural imagery with all the blood and thunder intact. The Laughing Stalk hammers home these paeans of reverence with a clattering, astringent mix of classic country, raw punk, and industrial rock, relentlessly driven by Ordy Garrison’s muscular drumwork. There’s a heroic Old West strain to the album, heard in the deep guitar twang of “Long Horn” and the Native American rhythms of “Maize.” “In the Temple” and “King O King” catch the band at their most rapturously brutal. “As Wool” and “Closer” offer Bible-rooted commentaries on man’s place in God’s grand design, sung by Edwards with a forbidding bravura worthy of Jim Morrison.