What do you get when you take two Americans and two Frenchmen, add a dash of fire and brimstone, some hurdy-gurdy, some fiddle and some banjo? You get 16 Horsepower, whose surprising new album Low Estate is truly nothing like you've ever heard before.

If Marilyn Manson had gotten his start on "Hee Haw", he might now sound like 16 Horsepower. The grandson of an old-fashioned Bible-thumping Nazarene preacher, frontman David Eugene Edwards howls about the darker side of Christianity which has lost prominence in the 20th century. "Wicked, wicked from the mouth I spout/O, Lord, don't let these thoughts come out" he sings on "My Narrow Mind," but the thoughts come out anyway.

Recorded just up the road in Lafayette by sometime PJ Harvey collaborator John Parish, Low Estate is a figurative, and sometimes literal, journey through Hell. In "Ditch Digger", Edwards is looking for an ex-love: "I dug on down-for to see my true love/She is the only girl I will speak of/Yes, I went on down for to get my girl/And free her from the Devil's world." In "Pure Clob Road", he has "Sin in my sack" and "Sin in my marrow". In "Dead Run", Edwards says "the Devil's brand is on my bones."

16 Horsepower is Western, but it's a West that died long ago, the music of a time when the frontier was somewhere near Ohio updated for the end of the millenium. Throughout, Edwards, guitarist/cellist/organ player Jeffrey Paul, drummer/pianist Jean Yves Tola and bassist/guitarist/fiddle player Pascal Humbert hoot, holler and romp like a band at Satan's own hoedown given one last chance at redemption. The most bizarre moment occurs on "For Heaven's Sake"; Edwards sounds like he's been momentarily possessed by the not-yet-dead spirit of Bono and the band abandons their banjos and fiddles for distorted slide guitars. It's the one song that could work on non-college radio today. Too old-timey for country, too bizarre for rock, 16 Horsepower seem doomed to the fringe, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't check out the undeniably-powerful Low Estate. It is a listening experience like none other; this band sounds like they went on tour in 1880 and just got a little lost.