The one-year-sabbatical that 16 Horsepower took was used by front person David Eugene Edwards for the refined solo album Woven Hand which was released earlier this year. Now the band from Denver, Colorado is back, reduced to a trio, with a 37-minute-album, of which every second hits like a sledgehammer. An album too that raises as many questions as it answers. Just take that title, Folklore.

A term usually associated with folk dancing, knitting in the Balkan or macramé on the Maldives. If there is something these neo-folk-traditionalists have never rendered themselves guilty of it is folklore. But you can turn it around too: here they create their own personal folk tradition. Which isn't connected to a specific culture anymore, but only exists in David Eugene Edwards' head.

Mysterious messages from an indeterminate time. Ten songs. Four own compositions. The others are, as far as we can trace, more or less radical adaptations. From Hank Williams (Alone And Forsaken) to the Carter Family (Single Girl) and from traditionals from America (Sinnerman) and Hungary (Outlaw Song) to the very mysterious Horse Head Fiddle, which hails from Tuva according to the booklet, but sounds like the exorcism of a bunch of Transylvanian gnomes. There's the rambling mazurka, La Robe A Parasol, which is sung in French naturally (what do you expect with two Frenchmen in the band).

The electrifying instrumentations of predecessor Secret South have been stripped to a frugal and mostly acoustic core. Edwards leaves his slide-guitar at home and only takes out his bandoneon in the musette-like Flutter, an out of this world love song of a beauty that is out of this world.

That the results of these more restrained settings work out more emphatic than ever, is because Edwards beliefs in something. That it is all connected to God, that actually hardly matters. This man has the disposal of a passion and enthusiasm almost unprecedented in contemporary pop music. He's not a jolly fellow. But nobody knows how to transpose the deepest and darkest undercrofts of the human soul into such convincing, original and purifying music.