Secret South
The label has changed (Sixteen Horsepower's first two albums,Sackcloth 'n' AshesandLow Estateappeared on A&M;), but, thankfully, little else has. Sixteen Horsepower's palette is still exclusively composed of banjos and accordions, gothic portent and religious foreboding. They still sound like William Faulkner's prose rendered as music, like they belong less in modern music venues and more on a Civil War battlefield, perhaps struggling to be heard through the lifting smoke and screams of the wounded at Antietam. Singer and lyricist David Eugene Edwards continues to straddle the divide between country singer and medicine-show evangelist. In an age when country music has been hijacked by the gormless drones of corporate Nashville and the irony-straitjacketed art students who populate too many alt-country groups, he is a rare and precious reminder of a prior time when country was defined by the holy furies of theLouvin BrothersandHank Williams. "Burning Bush" and "Praying Arm Lane" might even be the two best things he's written, and the exuberant cover ofBob Dylan's "'Cept You" is surely definitive. Secret South is Sixteen Horsepower's finest hour.--Andrew Mueller