"America doesn't want to hear old American music, really," explains Sixteen Horsepower's frontman, David Eugene Edwards. "It makes them think of early America, which is a drag to think about if you're an American -- if you're seriously thinking about it and looking at it." When Edwards talks about early America, he is of course referring to the darkest aspects of our country's past: the enslavement of Africans, the slaughter of Indians and the rape of a fertile land. He's also thinking of the moral fortitude of the Old Wild West that found sinners and other outlaws having to answer to a form of justice much higher than that of Man's. It was a younger, more primitive country, one in which the lines between right and wrong were more clearly defined than they are today, and the punishments for wrong-doing were much swifter and more severe. The word of God was also the word of the state, the jailer and the executioner. Edwards and the music that he creates with Sixteen Horsepower exists solely in this world.

Born the grandson of a traveling Nazarene minister, Edwards spent his earliest years in Colorado, drifting from one congregation to the next, absorbing his grandfather's teachings through the sound of the churches' somber hymns. "The music of the church was the most important thing to me when I went there," Edwards says. "That's where I learned the doctrine, where it came to me. That was how I was spoken to." Consequently, his lyrics are steeped in spooky religious allegory and images of a bygone era, part Western adventure, fire-and-brimstone justice, and Southern Gothic weirdness, while his musical inclinations lean towards the gloomy atmospherics of centures-old Appalachian gospel, bluegrass and blues music. Edwards' careening backwoods holler and twisted scripture has found and equal partner in Sixteen Horsepower, a Denver-based combo employing almost exclusively antique and acoustic instruments. On the band's second album, Low Estate (A&M), Edwards mans a banjo, bandoneon (an old push-button accordion), hurdy-gurdy and slide guitar, while his mates use fiddle, cello, stand-up bass, organ and drums to evoke a ghostly, haunted kind of American music that is worlds away from anything heard on contemporary U.S. radio. "Seems like music that has a Western feel or a country feel to it nowadays has to have some sort of modern thing going along with it for people to accept it," says Edwards. "What we try to do is play that type of music and just intensify it. The feeling that I get from the music that I love that's old timey, like mountain music -- we tried to do that same thing, but with more intensity because I have an amp that I can use to do that. But I don't try to make it sound modern. I try to make the intensity of it stand out even more, which I think freaks people out."

"Every instrument, at least old ones, has a mood," he explains further. "Pretty much everything that we use is old. Just because we like the way it sounds, the way it feels, the way it looks. Everything about it really. And we pretty much dislike everything that's new, everything about new instruments. I would never get one or play one. It doesn't interest me at all. I like the fact that [our instruments are] old. There's so many instruments that nobody even uses anymore, 'cause it got down to this thing where everybody uses the same instruments -- bass, drums, guitar. It's just boring. It's just kind of a preferred lifestyle [for us]. Some people wear tennis shoes and sweats all the time, and I wear cowboy boots. It's a style, it's what I like and appreciate. I like older things. [In] modern country music they'll throw a banjo in, but it's kind of a novelty for them: 'Oh, isn't this neat? This is an instrument that used to be in country music.' I don't understand that type of thinkin'."

Even a cursory listen to Low Estate reveals Edwards' undeniable knack for re-tooling old-world Biblical allegory into rich, shadowy poetry that has as much to do with the influence of Nick Cave as it does with the Old Testament. "When will I hurt for Heaven's sake / When will I suffer for the sake of Heaven?" he wails on "For Heaven's Sake" with such pure wickedness in his voice you have to wonder whether he's referring to the same heaven of which we're thinking. He opens "Dead Run" with "The devil's brand is on my bones, an' from inside the Holy Ghost groans," the struggle in his voice mirrored by the galloping percussion and spirited cacophony of fiddle, slide guitar and banjo swelling beneath him. One has to wonder: Are Edwards and his bandmates truly possessed by the spirits of a time past? Are these dark, sin-and-redemption-stained tales the product of an active imagination, or the real manifestations of man caught in a world not of his making?

"I just sing about what I think about and what I believe in," Edwards says plainly. "I feel like I have some sort of insight given to me, nothing of my own. Yes, sometimes I do sing about people who are religios in a worldly sort of way rather than a true spiritual kind of way; the oppression that [man-made religion] can cause and the effects of that; the way it causes people to view Christianity. I hear on the news that 95% of Americans say that they believe in God, but that's just ridiculous to me. They say that because they would be afraid to say no, basically. But they don't really care about God, they just say that... The views people have of Christianity are so warped. And that goes for people saying they believe in God but don't really. And that goes for people who are preaching on TV and preaching in the church and they don't really believe in God, they're just doing it. And that's what causes people to have such a bad view of Christianity. But that's okay, it doesn't really matter because everybody's a screw-up anyway. Everybody needs God. Everybody does. Everybody's a sinner (I believe), and nobody's good, even if they do good things... [Some religious conservatives might say] 'You concentrate too much on the darkness and dwell too much on the sin' or this or that, but I would say to them that I believe this is what God wants me to say. I'm not making this music for people who are truly believers in God, I'm making it for people who aren't. It's very prevalent in today's world for people to believe that they don't do anything wrong. As long as they're good people and they don't go around murdering anyone, they're good people. And I'm here to say that's not the case."