16 Horsepower
Sackcloth 'n' Ashes

THE REVIEW

"If I were Cain".

16 horsepower in the tattered garments of three musicians.

In 1995, 16 Horsepower released "Sackcloth 'n' Ashes". But for David Eugene Edwards and company, 1995 is not a year with a singular identity. Nick Cave has already sown his malevolent seeds and has already concluded the violent advance of a group no one would want to see at their birthday party. Joy Division plummeted 15 years ago into Ian Curtis's suicide, while Jeffrey Lee Pierce is about to shoot his final bullet of heroin at himself.

16 Horsepower gather the sacrificial garments and ashes left along the road by these tutelary deities and, donned with the former and dusted with the latter, they surrender to a funeral return to the 19th century. A desperate, furious modern era, in perennial contact with death, fiercely and cautiously enters the same archetypal world where the "bald-headed and gigantic infant", Judge Holden, the symbol of man's and Earth's perennial evil intelligence—Cormack McCarthy's creature—exists.

Edwards is a wayward root of the American song tree. A root with a unique and immense talent for writing epic, ancient songs, simple as only eternal melodies can be. Accompanied by the compact and intelligent rhythmic backdrop created by the excellent drummer Jean-Yves Tola and bassist Keven Soll, Edwards becomes painter and prophet. Banjo and concertina become the brushes of a painting of religiosity where the loving deity of Christian iconography gives way to a god in eternal struggle with evil.

"Black Soul Choir" is the ultimate (and not isolated) masterpiece of "Sackcloth 'n' Ashes"

"Ain't none ever seen the face of his foe no
He ain't made of flesh & bone
He's the one who sits up close beside you
An when he's there you are alone"

The devil ensconced in solitude, presence and absence at once, a monster opposed to divine ubiquity. The absence of hope in fellow humans, raindrops on a land too arid. A god that "is the one you keep cold on the outside, girl". A continuous banjo arpeggio, a double bass, drums. A musical crescendo, a face torn by the devouring awareness that Evil, religiously considered or otherwise, has forces superior to those of Good.

"Black Bush" is a cry in the desert; it's what Old Testament preachers would have sung if transported from the deserts of Asia Minor to the American ones. Never, in the Christianity we know, has the hope for the resurrection of the flesh and for the power of the Risen been painted with such fervent passion: but even here the ingenious melody expresses unease, not joy; and with it tension, weeping, ecstasy, anger.

"Look, see, his bones are gone
He done left the grave
The grip of death it could not hold him down no
It's for him that I rave".