The spirit of the recently departed Jeffrey Lee Pierce, and his Gun Club, haunts the tortured ravings of David Eugene Edwards and his Denver-based trio, Sixteen Horsepower. Like a dead man walking under the whip of an Appalachian devil, Edwards picks at scraps of white-trash folk-blues with his skeletal banjo and queasy slide-guitar. He faces down demons in the galloping "Black Soul Choir," summons visions of unrequited love in the mournful, ominous "Scrawled in Sap," and comes close to stepping on Nick Cave's black-polished toenails when he puts his "Heel on the Shovel" and, in a fit of Biblical righteousness, buries a man who needed killing. Unlike Cave and Pierce, though, Edwards isn't the least bit conflicted about his schtick. With able neo-trad support from the snare, kick, and high-hat of Jean-Yves Tola, acoustic bass and cello of Keven Soll, and an occasional cameo on fiddle by Violent Femme Gordan Gano, Edwards sticks to his guns without breaking character -- not even to laugh at his own joke when he steals a line from Nancy Sinatra and twists it into "My knees were made for kneelin'/and that's just what they'll do" in the bluesy sway of "Black Bush."

(Sixteen Horsepower open for the Dirt Merchants this Friday, May 3, upstairs at the Middle East.)