"... David Eugene Edwards' grandfather was a preacher in Colorado. David would sit quietly at the back of the church listening to his epic tales of hellfire and damnation, but never once was he frightened by them. Two decades later, David is still a Christian, only now he's in a band called 16 Horsepower with his friends, Rob Redick on bass and Jean-Yves Tola on drums.

"Well, at first the band were simply called Horsepower," begins David, softly, "but a lot of people thought that was something to do with heroin. That really pissed me off, so I decided to put something in front of it to distract them. "I got '16' from a traditional American folk song, where a man is singing about his dead wife and 16 black horses are pulling her casket up to the cemetery. I liked the image of 16 working horses."

Inspired by the barbed gothic musings of Nick Cave and The Gun Club, 16 Horsepower songs have many tales to tell about sin and redemption. What's more, the band's insistence on using antiquated banjos, accordions and upright bass makes them sound unnervingly like a product of the 1870s.

"In America, I think we've gone so far towards the future that no-one really fits in any more. People try really hard every day, but they just can't do it. "It's the same with all great civilizations, the Romans or whoever; they reach a certain peak of progress, and then they're levelled. Basically that's going to happen all over again."