Discover the music of “The Frontier”
The Band:
16 HORSEPOWER, Denver, Colorado
The CD:
SACKCLOTH AND ASHES, A&M Records 1995
**** (out of four)
16 Horsepower swoops from the speakers warm and strange like a mid-winter Rocky Mountain chinook. “Sackcloth and Ashes,” the debut release from this Denver-based trio, is an unsettling melange of unusual instrumentation and rhythms that conjure aural impressions of what the 19th-century would have been like with multi-track recording studios.
Imagine Poe and Whitman fronting a postmodern anti-pop band with Twain and Hawthorne on drums and bass. This music sings in sepia tone. Dark themes of redemption and revenge, lust and lost love mark trenchant lyrics that convey a jaw-clenching sense of flint-hard life in adolescent America. This
collection could be the soundtrack to an imaginary Western as directed by Rod Serling.
Lyricist David Eugene Edwards writes in “Heel on the Shovel,”
I’m diggin’ you a shallow grave
An’ on your rotten bones I’ll raise
Yellow daisies for my true loves hair
O I’m all hitched up an’ runnin’
From the “I Seen What I Saw”:
Then I climbed upon the big horse strappin’
Put the spurs down to blood
He took off 16 horses strong
Left me lyin’ in the mud
From “Black Soul Choir”:
Every man is evil yes
An’ every man a liar
An’ unashamed with wicked tongues
Sing in the black soul choir
“Sackcloth and Ashes” should not be regarded as just another pop album but a brilliant melding of muse and mood and a genre unto itself. Start track one, light some sage, turn down the lights, and you just might see the gaunt and bitter spirits of which 16 Horsepower sings hovering in the ether above.
16 Horsepower is:
David Eugene Edwards : vocals, guitar, banjo, bandoneon, lap steel
Jean-Yves Tola : drums, backup vocals
Keven Soll : Stand up bass, flat top acoustic bass, cello, backup vocals
Review by Joseph Falco
May 17, 1996