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Micah P. Hinson is a young old man with a sharp gaze and the spartan air of someone who ends up in a bordello by chance. He has the murky and dark voice of a punk Johnny Cash, and the dry fingers of his hands bleed nervously on the acoustic-folk, telling of family dramas, Southern stories, and burned passions. Bitter or less bitter life things, things that a twenty-seven-year-old has seen too many of, and you wouldn't believe it. Looking at him, Hinson almost seems like an Elvis Costello raised in Texas among amphetamines, Jack Daniel's, and vagrancy arrests. Someone who can tell you that she is no longer there, has disappeared, and maybe was never there before, while weighing the aftermath and heart's delusions; yet you understand that Micah is sincere, doesn't lie, and tells his own story.
His records are like the (beautiful) covers: ancient, elegant, evocative of worlds only imagined and therefore more real than real. Because we desperately seek them within our torments, in the dark cavities of human miseries. And sometimes they are there waiting for us. "And The Red Empire Orchestra" already from the title demands, and obtains, a different attention from the rest of the small Hinson troop. A precise stylistic variety in place of the renewed expressive maturity of the slender author. Production by John Congleton (Paper Chase) from noble songwriting and cunning arrangements, shiny, precious. Loose and solitary like strays in the town square on a Saturday morning, while it rains on the indifference of people.
The Red Empire Orchestra plays heart-wrenching string notes towards sunset, and the Texan songwriter finally manages to ferry his "violent country" into a peaceful journey on the way home. Where maybe the muse-companion and a rusty gramophone await him (Come Home Quickly, Darlin'). Hinson languidly abandons his music in classic banjo embroidery (When We Embraced), in the vulnerability of bedroom confessions of "I Keep Havin' These Dreams", in the insinuating violin and sliding arpeggios in Throw The Stone. A soft drum and delicate strings stretch out in the intimate "Tell Me It Ain't So". The ghost of Roy Orbison meets Lambchop in the nostalgic ballad from a '50s crooner "Sunrise Over The Olympus Mons", corroded in the finale by an emotional electric, and in the curious surf/country setup of "You Will Find Me". And a sad, sweet reverb of electricity illuminates a dark room in the short "The Wishing Well And The Willow Tree". Micah now crosses the long night without the old fears (the organ and choruses in the fleeing Dylan in Nashville of "We Won't Have To Be Lonesome"), the only concern that holds a weary soul on a leash is "dying alone, without having sought it out, without having known it..."
The lyrical romanticism of "Dyin' Alone" bids us all farewell from the pain of loss, taking Natalie Wood/Debbie by the hand in the moving return to the Jorgensen farm. The door at the threshold slowly opens, and outside the silhouette of Ethan Edwards fades into Myth, forever.
"I'm not afraid of the sunset or the rain, I'm just afraid of dyin' alone..And what would you find. And what would you sing. And what would you mean..I'm not afraid of the suffering or the pain, I'm just afraid of dyin' without finding you.."
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