Salon | Sharps and Flats: 16 Horsepower

H E A R__I T

"Sac of Religion"
from 16 Horsepower's Low Estate
(736k)

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T A B L E__T A L K

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F E A T U R E

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By Gavin McNett
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(01/20/98)

16 Horsepower
__--> L O W__E S T A T E___A & M___| -- BY NATASHA STOVALL -- |

Faith -- despite our cultural fascination with it -- remains a subject most Americans approach with trepidation. Observance is one thing, but pure, intense fervor is quite another; we call it zealotry, fundamentalism. So it's rather unusual to find hellfire-and-brimstone in that most secular of organizations, the contemporary American pop group.

But Denver's 16 Horsepower, the brainchild of David Eugene Edwards, is a rather unusual case. A singer-songwriter whose grandfather was a traveling Colorado preacher, Edwards grew up journeying through the backwoods of the Rockies listening to his grandpa's tales of sin and damnation. As an adult, he did a stint in Roger Corman's Los Angeles film studio, but he found himself more bewitched by century-old Appalachian folk music than by Corman's epics. His interests grew into a sound that reverberates back to turn-of-the-century mountain life, the life his grandfather knew, where pain was eased only by the balm of sin or the promise of salvation.

Mountains are a potent touchstone for the darkly radiant "Low Estate" -- they're at this music's root: Banjos, fiddles and accordions are responsible for "Low Estate's" haunted, age-old, hard-scrabble sound. Mountains frame the westward journey that thousands of Americans made at the turn of the century, bringing their merciless religion across the country, the same religion of "Low Estate." And only the mountains can match that theology in unforgiving severity.

Sixteen Horsepower's themes are redemption and sin, temptation and fear. Edwards is a true believer, and when he sings, he calls up ghosts: men at the mercy of fate and God, men of "low estate" who always have the devil close at their heels. In Edwards' writing, God and Satan, good and evil, are not mere concepts, but realities. And their battle for men's souls is fought in real time -- in bars and bedrooms and music halls.

These men are vulnerable; they can be tempted just as Satan was, and cast out of heaven. "Where could I go, but to the Lord?" Edwards sings on "For Heavens Sake" over a riff that expands his ancestral music into near-Gothic techno. "I've been to your house, seen what you adore. I left there stiff, stiff as a board. Where could I go, but to the Lord? I am weak without the joy of the Lord."

The production by John Parrish (PJ Harvey) brings to "Low Estate" a smoothness that reveals all the branches of 16 Horsepower's family tree. Like Harvey's "To Bring You My Love," "Low Estate" lies along a continuum, one that starts in Europe, travels through Celtic folk, crosses the Atlantic to Southern Gothic, then onto bluegrass, blues, rock, heavy metal and beyond. The only difference is that Harvey creates her own universe in which she plays creator, sustainer and destroyer. Edwards operates in a world in which he is just one small, weak but faithful man who's not quite ready to meet his maker.
SALON | Jan. 26, 1998

Natasha Stovall is a regular contributor to Salon.