Gothic and learned, the Franco-American band's new album explores the Deep South once again, and starts to go round in circles.

Who could have foreseen, as 16HP's real first album was discreetly released, 4 years ago (Sackcloth 'n' Ashes could then be unearthed only among imported records), how important that band would become in the French rock scene? At the time, their sour country-punk music, riddled with references and branded with misplaced hatred, definitely jarred, wart-like, with the already triumphant electronic trend, which was altogether not in line with the biblical parables written by DEE, an impassioned preacher and sheer embodiment of fantasy for a few academics who missed Faulkner, Erksine Caldwell and Jeffrey Lee Pierce...

Yet, one tended to forget pretty quickly that the biggest-selling rock-labelled bands in France, Noir Désir (whose singer Bertrand Cantat recorded 2 cover songs with 16HP on Low Estate) and Louise Attaque (whose first album was produced by Gordon Gano from the Violent Femmes) openly claim to draw their inspiration, for better or for worse, from the Gun Club and the Violent Femmes.

And one tended to forget that in France, the prevailing cliché about the USA depicts the South as deep and abrupt –just the way 16HP convey it in their songs: a sticky world only inhabited by inbred country bumpkins and racist bigots whose poor daily lives appear as a mythical epic.

Reaching a peak with the release of the highly inspired, climaxing album "Low Estate", 16HP's art was lavishly exposed on stage, where DEE gives spirited performances and looks like a mesmerizing, haunted minstrel with a protruding lower jaw, displaying in turn a battered banjo or a concertina larger than him. Such a scenery, on the brink of caricature, was eventually bound to freeze their music, now doomed to evolve between the obtuse limits they set and got trapped into. Indeed, Secret South doesn't bring anything new, in the writing process as much as in the performing process. On 16HP's scale, Secret South (the mere title says it all) is jam-packed with the clichés that made the band relatively successful: the squealing guitars still sound the same, and DEE's voice still reminds us of some caterwauling cat nailed alive up on a barn's door. One can only notice the addition of a string section, which wasn't exactly essential, and a rare Dylan cover ("Nobody 'cept you"), along with an odd propensity for "Gothism" ("Cinder Alley"), which sometimes throws the album into the dark throes of new-wave -so hip it hurts.

It is pretty clear that Secret South is above all aimed at 16HP's hardcore fans, who will revel in it, just as children never get tired of listening to the same tales over and over again. After all, chanting litanies seems to lie in DEE's mystical nature.

One just wonders how many believers left there are in the flock.

Translation by Magali