David Eugene Edwards is a serious-minded young man. How could it be any different, life is no picnic, if you're in Denver, Colorado, making out-of-the-way roots music, which consequently withdraws from any form of cheap categorization, and if you know for sure, on top of that, that the devil is omnipresent watching for an opportunity to get the tormented soul of the devout musician under his spell as well. There's only one option left: write songs, in which you bear up against your demons, and propagate them with a band like 16 Horsepower, so that the devil may change his mind.

Last year their debut "Sackcloth 'n' Ashes" made us prick up our ears. Shortly after Jeffrey Lee Pierce's death, it seemed as if the Gun Club member had just breathed his primal American spirit into this particular serious young man, who now in a similar sonorous voice, with that characterizing catch in the voice, sang about his self-doubt, the psychical pits, the dark, soft underbelly of America. Musically speaking though, Edwards already went his own way with "Sackcloth". "Low Estate", the recently released second album is even more characteristic, has turned out even more individual, with this sound that isn't defined by the customary guitars, but by traditional, often forgotten instruments, like the hurdy-gurdy, accordion, banjo, bagpipes. Edwards' sixteen horses are trotting along the same road, over which once Nick Cave's "Carny" buried his nag.

That should have provided a general overview of 16 Horsepower's sound and frame of mind. It is hard for Edwards to talk about his dark images; it's easier for him to express himself through music, in which next to the images from his lyrics, a wholly subconscious world of allusions, possible significations and an infinite number of individual truths is conjured up through sound and rhythm.

"It is possible that one strophe doesn't go with the next at all", he admits, when we're talking about the opening song of the new album, "Brimstone Rock", in which the perspective continually seems to shift - one moment it sounds as if a father speaks to his daughter, the next rather like a man turning to his inamorata. "I'm not telling stories, rather short fragments, which are torn apart. Perhaps the first verse is about my daughter. The next one isn't any more. Maybe that's a bit difficult for people", he smiles, as if it were slightly embarrassing, "but this is how I happen to work."

Edwards is religious, a champion of the scriptural word, like they are rarely found in the rock-business. "I try to raise my children they way the Bible prescribes", he says. "My marriage too, I try to conduct it according to these principles. That's all I can do. But the devil doesn't worry me, even if it sounds that way. I'm only writing about it, that the devil does exist. Because that is what I believe. I can write about nothing else, as other things don't mean that much to me."

And so tracks like "Golden Rope" or "Pure Clob Road" are, one and all, pearls on the same necklace...