Planning a lip-smacking Donner party sometime in the near future? Here's the perfect entertainment to recruit for the evening -- Colorado country-Goth combo 16 Horsepower, whose "Sackcloth 'n' Ashes" bow for A&M is so steeped in Gold Rush lore and spooky "Wisconsin Death Trip" imagery you'll need a bifocaled historian to sort it all out. And wolf-baying lead singer David Eugene Edwards -- who plays nothing but vintage instruments such as banjo and button accordion -- would rather hang out in a dusty Wild West ghost town than some modern shopping mall. He'd rather discuss 19th century legends like the Alfred Packer story (another Donner-esque cannibal who chowed down on his mountain friends) than tune into the latest TV sitcom.

In fact, testifies the devoutly religious Edwards, "Television is wicked, it's evil, and everything that comes out of it is perverted and twisted." His grandfather was a by-the-Good-Book-Nazarene minister. Another part-Cherokee relative taught him Native American chants as a kid, and another ancestor wrestled bears for a living. "I had a *lot* of weird childhood experiences," he sighs, kicking back in his San Francisco hotel lobby in an ancient outfit of skinny trousers, railroadman's cap, and horsehide shoes so long and narrow it's a wonder they fit his feet. "My grandmother, who was married to the preacher, was really morbid. She'd always dress in black, and since they were the main religious figures around, she and the preacher would do all the funerals.

"And she was *always* showing me dead people," the 27-year old Edwards gulps. "We'd go to the funeral home and she'd be talking to the people there, and she'd tell me, 'Go downstairs and see what you can see down there!' And I'd go down and there'd be some dead guy lying in his coffin! I ended up seeing quite a few dead people that way."

Figures, then, that Edwards would open "Sackcloth 'n' Ashes" with the grim processional "I Seen What I Saw," where his haunted vocals float over bassist Kevin Soll and drummer Jean Yves Tola's military rhythm until it feels like a condemned soldier, trudging up the gallows steps. The band's name conjures up some spectral visions too -- 16 coal-black horses, galloping before a funeral train -- but that's just the tip of this chilly iceberg. Edwards weaves his Faulkneresque vernacular into inky dirge-rockers like "Harm's Way," "Black Soul Choir," "Scrawled In Sap," and a sinister spadeful-of-dirt-on-your-lid "Heel On The Shovel." The record's closest reference point would probably be (and Edwards confesses it is a major influence) the late Jeffrey Lee Pierce's blues/twanging Gun Club, circa its classic "Miami."

Edwards adds that he regularly checks out "Library of Congress records, old Appalachian music, and I just listen to it for hours and hours. I love it so much, and I love Irish and Cajun music too, and how it's all interconnected." In concert, he holds forth from a stool, which allows him to freely switch instruments and microphones as well -- one high-tech, the other a tinny relic from radio's heyday. He believes his 100-button bandonion (which he found in a pawnshop window early one morning and grew so obsessed with he sat in front of the shop until it opened a few hours later) is haunted, and bears humble witness to "God and the devil and demons and angels -- there are spiritual things going on around us all the time, things we don't know about. But sometimes," he smiles to unsettling effect, "we can catch a glimpse of them."

Naturally, one of the singer's favorite tomes is "Sleeping Beauty," a stark collection of early American funeral photography. After the camera was invented, photographs were so expensive that families would often wait until an uncle or aunt had met their maker to finally spring for one last portrait. Edwards wishes he were around back then, although he's quick to point out that "the train ruined everything, as far as I can tell." He removes his cap, slaps it on his bony knee and continues. "I've never been into trains -- they bother me, make me think of dead Indians and the price everyone paid to have this big hunk of steel go from one end of the country to the other. I mean, I'd love to go touring in a covered wagon, pulled by *horses*."

A few years ago, Edwards tried big city life, playing punky acoustic in an LA-based rock outfit. It didn't work. He retreated to Colorado, hooked up with Soll (who handcrafts his own flattop basses) and soon recruited Tola, a French expatriate he'd met in California. An indie EP, "Haw," was snatched up for distribution by A&M last autumn; the trio's righteously retro "Sackcloth" crept out of its crypt in February. And it isn't difficult to trace 16 Horsepower's themes of sin and redemption, crime and punishment, right back to Edwards' grandpappy, a man who never drank, smoked, cussed or even visited a movie theater in his entire life.

Edwards chuckles, recalling the preacher's stern admonitions whenever he'd crossed the line as a rebellious youth. "He'd say 'Son, go get me a hickory switch!' So I'd go out and find the tiniest little wisp of a hickory switch that I could."

And punishment would be exacted? Well, not really, he admits. You just couldn't pull the wool over that preacher's keen eyes in the hickory switch department, because ,"He'd always go cut one that was bigger."