16 Horsepower – Secret South

Speaking with 16 Horsepower frontman David Eugene Edwards earlier this year, two things struck me. The first emerged from comments he made regarding his group’s fondness for “old things that have a timeless quality”; both 16HP’s typically old-timey, sepia-toned sleeve art and its frequent deployment of vintage acoustic instruments testify to this. But on the Denver group’s third studio album, practically every song is antiqued, and so richly done that its nearest kin are Dylan’s John Wesley Harding and The Band’s self-titled album.

Like those late ’60s archetypes of a simpler yet culturally transitional brand of musical Americana, Secret South conjures a rural, Appalachian, at times Civil War-era sound whose resolutely minor-key arrangements seem instantly ancient. Edwards has noted that the album’s theme additionally involves the veiled history of his family and his Southern ancestors, which adds a Ken Burns-like documentary immediacy to the proceedings, with Edwards narrating these accounts as if from a revivalist tent preacher’s pulpit (his grandfather, in fact, was a traveling minister).

In the apocalyptic thrum ‘n’ drone of “Clogger”, for example, an unrepentant sinner is told to shore up for an accounts-settling with Satan, while in the astonishingly emotional “Splinters”, against a massive backdrop of ringing, echoing guitar chords, a shattered and broken man awaits God’s healing touch. It’s no coincidence that 16HP chose to cover the traditional “Wayfaring Stranger”; in it, while banjo and acoustic guitar eke out a stark, ethereal accompaniment, the titular stranger readies to cross over the River Jordan. Edwards’ songs are clearly steeped in his Christianity, yet they also seem designed to indicate how, as the modern world strips us of our collective, subconscious heritage, our essential humanity erodes from within: He who forgets the past is doomed…

The other thing Edwards told me was how deeply influenced he’d been by Bob Dylan and Nick Cave — and Joy Division. The first two seem obvious; both writers have dwelt extensively upon man’s frailties and temptations. Not only is 16HP’s flair for the Southern gothic very Cave-esque in texture, here the group covers Dylan’s obscure ’73 tune “Nobody ‘Cept You”, an acoustic meditation on the duality of love and faith.

The Joy Division connection may seem a curious one. But consider how deeply and seriously Edwards ponders the nature of pain in this world — how we inflict it upon ourselves and each other, how we plead for deliverance from it — and then note how often Joy Division’s Ian Curtis contemplated similar subject matter. Curtis, of course, felt overwhelmed and tragically selected suicide as his only means of relief. So it’s no stretch to presume that, along with the warning suggested above, Edwards, in his songwriting, wants to offer the world some hope that solace is always just around the corner. All you have to do is keep your eyes and ears open to the signs that appear before you.