He doesn't laugh easily, David Eugene Edwards, I could establish that when I interviewed him two years ago in connection with the sensational debut-album of "his" band 16 Horsepower.

For an hour I was lectured on the bible with an intensity I can't recall from the single confirmation class, that was optional in non-denominational schools in the fifties.

In contrast with the affable middle-aged teacher with a little knot in her hair, who tried to show a handful of unbelieving 10-year-olds from the Jordan(!) district of Amsterdam the ropes of God's inscrutable, as is well-known, ways, David Eugene Edwards seemed to maintain a "hot line" with the Supreme Being. That does not alter the fact that 16 Horsepower's debut-album, 'Sackcloth 'n' Ashes', was heavenly and that the concert at the Paradiso (a former church!) was a divine service never to be forgotten, one of the sort Europeans only know from movies about religious maniacs in the deepest south of the United States, usually with actors of the Anthony Perkins type in the leading part.

'Sackcloth 'n' Ashes' was so good that had to be feared that Edwards cum suis would never be able to match that feat. All the more reason to rejoice at the fact that 16 Horsepower's second album, 'Low estate', is even better, if possible, than their sensational debut. All ingredients of 'Sackcloth 'n' Ashes' - the heart-rendering vocals, the hopping banjo, the melancholic bandoneon (an Argentine accordion from 1903 that Edwards picked up in a pawnshop in Denver, Colorado) and the percussion of 16 Horsepower's French drummer Jean-Yves Tola that now and again increases to a storm - are brought to bear on 'Low Estate' with great effectiveness. And of course there are the hell and damnation preaching lyrics of the pastor saying his 'prayers'.

No, he doesn't laugh easily, that David Eugene Edwards.