SIXTEEN HORSEPOWER FRONTMAN David Eugene Edwards is all rock star, from his ushunka hat down to his toes. His concerts sell out two months in advance. He is a magazine cover boy and was the subject of an hour-long national television special. He can't walk down a street without being approached or even mobbed by fans.

That's the way it is in Amsterdam. If only that were true 5,000 miles closer to home.

Edwards can slip in and out of a downtown Denver coffee shop unrecognized, surrounded by sipping strangers unaware that he is the genius behind what a Denver Post panel of 25 local music experts considers Colorado's best underground band.

"It feels really good that our band was recognized (in the voting), especially in Colorado," said Edwards, whose band has just returned from an 11-nation European tour and will play its first Colorado concert of 2001 on Friday at Boulder's Fox Theatre.

"Just to be recognized in your own hometown is kind of a feat because for most bands all over the country, people are somewhat more willing to accept a band from out of state than they are in their own hometown. I think that if they know you, they think you can't be all that good."

Sixteen Horsepower is all that good. Edwards (who plays banjo, guitar, concertina, accordion and hurdy gurdy), with Pascal Humbert (electric and standup bass), Jean-Yves Tola (drums, piano) and Stephen Taylor (guitar), has fashioned a complicated, fully orchestrated Gothic-country rock band that addresses issues of mortality, sin and redemption with urgency and unflinching honesty.

"I would have a hard time saying any band in Colorado, or any band, period, is more important right now than 16 Horsepower," said Post panelist Paul Epstein, owner of the Twist & Shout record store and a director of the Colorado Music Association. "Their stuff is of the highest caliber of music."

Edwards is a deeply spiritual man whose personal, poetic tales of 19th-century-toned apocalyptic battles between good and evil paint a picture for the mind as vividly as the sound does for the ear.

"I think our music has a desperation to it," said Edwards, who confronts head-on those questions of salvation and damnation that others might run from. "It's urgent desperation."

Seeing Edwards perform in the flesh "is a haunting experience," Epstein said. It is an effect so palpable it has crossed the ocean and infiltrated the mind of Ing, a 16 Horsepower fan from The Netherlands.

"If I close my eyes and listen to the songs, I see a picture of a guy struggling and trying to do good, but with all kind of temptations lurking in the back," she said. "If you combine this image with the music that is always chock-full of tension, it makes 16 Horsepower very vulnerable and delicate.

"But their music is not easy to digest. It absolutely demands something of your heart and soul. The tension in the songs is like a vortex that sucks you in. It definitively is challenging music."

Listening can be at once exhilarating and reverential, like an old-fashioned tent revival. That's familiar territory for Edwards, who grew up constantly contemplating issues of spirituality and mortality.

Edwards, 33, was born in 1968, the grandson of a Nazarene preacher, part of a particularly conservative branch of the Protestant church. His father, a lapsed preacher, died, and the boy joined his grandparents as they traveled through small towns in southern Colorado and parts of Texas. Edwards absorbed his grandfather's unrelenting fire-and-brimstone sermons calmly and without fear.

"They would spend maybe a year, two years in one place and then go to a different church," Edwards said. "It wasn't that he was necessarily an itinerant preacher, it just happened that someone else would need a preacher and he would feel like going there."

Edwards spent much time in the care of his grandmother, who was so overcome with grief after her son died that she developed somewhat of a morbid fascination with death. She often took the boy to funeral homes, which helped develop the macabre sense of humor he often displays in his lyrics.

But Edwards truly loved the church, especially the music. "Everything in my life had to do with the church," he said, "and that's where I was first exposed to any sort of music."

When Edwards reached adolescence, he began searching for his definition of spirituality - and his own music. He formed his first band at age 14, a punk outfit called RMC (Restless Middle Class). At 16, he left Arapahoe High School with a GED and moved in with musician Slim Cessna in Boulder.

"I just wanted to play music," Edwards said. "That was all I cared about. I just had no interest in the things I was learning at school, which is not that great of a thing. I wish I had been, but I wasn't."

When Edwards married his girlfriend, Leah, at age 17, the old preacher promised eternal damnation. Two years later, Edwards was a father himself. Daughter Asher, now 13, plays cello on the most recent 16 Horsepower CD, "Secret South," and son Elijah is 3.

"I was rebellious, just like any other kid to a degree, but I never rebelled against the church," Edwards said. "I rebelled against things around me that I saw in society, especially when I was into punk music. But I never felt like I was rebelling against what I believed in because I've always believed in the right thing and the true thing."

In Boulder, Edwards and Cessna formed a transitional band called Blood Flower. "That band had nothing to do with country music," said Robert Ferbrache, a one-time lap-steel player for 16 Horsepower, who has produced records for dozens of bands, including Dick Dale and Maraca Five-O. "It was psychedelic, crazy, the most unique band in the world. But it was there the band members discovered they were all interested in gospel and country music. They took that up and created their own Americana thing."

Edwards said his transition from punk to psychedelic to alt-country was logical. "Most of the music that I listened to when I was into so-called punk rock was similar to what I do now anyway," he said. "It was kind of roots-based like the Gun Club and Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds. Plus I listened to a lot of Appalachian and Eastern European music."

Edwards' 1985 collaboration with Cessna was the start of a family tree of bands that would come to dominate the Colorado music scene, including the Denver Gentlemen, Slim Cessna's Auto Club, Munly and the Kalamath Brothers. Three of those groups placed in The Post's top 10 - 16 Horsepower, Slim Cessna's Auto Club and Munly.

Edwards named 16 Horsepower after a folk song in which 16 horses pull a grieving man's wife to the cemetery. To Edwards, horsepower is synonymous with labor: sometimes difficult, always necessary.

The band began in earnest in 1992, when Edwards met Jean-Yves Tola, a classically trained flautist and jazz drummer, and bass player Pascal Humbert. The trio worked as carpenters at a Los Angeles movie studio owned by Roger Corman, the eccentric low-budget director who would produce campy films in a matter of days.

"We probably built sets for 50 films," Edwards said. "They were pretty much all garbage, but it paid my rent."

Edwards returned to Colorado with Tola, and 16 Horsepower's first concert followed at the Mercury Cafe in front of 40 friends. Humbert would not join the group until 1996 and Taylor in 1997.

Sixteen Horsepower's initial self-titled EP in 1995 drew comparisons to Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, and the band was signed to powerful A&M Records. For their major-label debut, "Sackcloth 'n' Ashes," they were assigned to producer Warren Bruleigh, who had worked with one of Edwards' favorite bands, the Violent Femmes. Bruleigh brought in Femmes frontman Gordon Gano, who played fiddle on two tracks.

It was the start of a friendship that for Edwards had begun years before, when he first heard the Femmes' "Country Death Song," a disturbing tale of a man who crosses into insanity when he throws his daughter down a well.

"We grew up similarly, I think, because his father was a preacher, as well," Edwards said. "Both of us were a little bit outcast-ish. We got along really well, and we ended up touring with them for a while. I bump into him all the time now, all over the world."

But when A&M Records was bought out in February 1999, 16 Horsepower suddenly went from a band on the verge of stardom to a band without a label. The German record company Glitterhouse signed them for European distribution, but it would be almost a year before they hooked up with a U.S. label, Razor & Tie.

In the interim, the band made "Secret South" with Ferbrache, who also released a live CD, "Hoarse," through Glitterhouse. Checkered Past Records will release "Hoarse" in the U.S. June 12.

The band's popularity in Europe continues to grow while it remains relatively anonymous here. The band was recently on the cover of the Dutch equivalent of Rolling Stone magazine, and a 50-minute Dutch documentary showing the band at home in Denver was broadcast in prime time.

The Dutch, apparently, can't get enough of 16 Horsepower. Ing said the cultural divide begins with radio.

"In the Netherlands, we have good national noncommercial broadcasting stations that support a lot of underground music," she said. "But it's never been easy for non-middle-of-the-road bands to get the attention of the U.S. media. It's almost a tradition that American bands first break through here before they do in their own country."

She also credits the difference in European sensibilities when it comes to being confronted by difficult and overtly religious metaphors.

"We see all kind of biblical references in art, books and architecture, here, therefore we are not as easily deterred by Christian-tinted lyrics," she said.

Ferbrache said the band should be proud of its success without compromise, even if it costs them a shot at mainstream popularity.

"Their music requires thought and passion, and I think people on a pulp level aren't interested in that anymore," he said. "Sure, they want to sell records and have people come to their concerts, but they can hold their heads up proud because they are doing what they want to do."

And all the while, Edwards has managed to maintain both his musical and spiritual integrity.