Formerly called "Heaven's Metal," HM is a bi-monthly magazine covering the Christian hard music scene.

16 Horsepower
SECRET SOUTH
Razor & Tie

Why doesn’t 16 Horsepower have the rabid following of believers that would allow their scarifyingly inventive alt country-rock ink and airtime through the print and radio arms of more corporately commercial Christian media vehicles than, say, HM?

Because, after an EP and two longplayers on A&M through to Secret South, the band’s singer / songwriter and apparently only Christian member David Eugene Edwards continues to use biblical themes and imagery not so much to encourage, pacify, rally the troops, or soothe as to exorcise and haunt. That is, to exorcise the nature of his old man (in the spiritual sense) and to haunt his audience with the Lord’s aroma. So, yeah, 16 Horsepower use mandolin, hurdy, fiddles (doubling as a more classical string quartet formation here, too), but within a rootsy punk aesthetic familiar to fans of The Gun Club or Ballydowse. Their sense of atmospherics and Edwards’ plaintive baritone may even lure those curious as to what The Doors may have sounded like had Jim Morrison been Christian and possessed of an Appalachia fetish. Secret South sounds more electric in production than previous 16Hp efforts, but no less enchanting. "Praying Arms Lane", with its rolling banjo motif, declares the Second Coming in apocalyptically poetic imprecations. "Splinters" affirms Christ’s comfort over foreboding Smokey Mountains-via-the Middle East progressions. In these numbers and elsewhere, Edwards’ dramatic delivery and the singularity of his band-mates’ musical vision makes for art that attracts the artistically adventurous, making believers proud to count Edwards among their ranks and those yet to believe curious because of 16Hp’s poetry and unique stylistic confluence.

Proving they respect their roots, a cover of the standard "Wayfaring Stranger" gets bent into a purgatorial maelstrom of processed vocals and an arrangement that would leave bluegrass pioneers like Bill Monroe flummoxed. A remake of Bob Dylan’s "Nobody ‘Cept You" reveals the band’s rarer, tender side, strangely pretty it is. Secret South is less for those who want to bang their heads than to have them messed over. But 16 Horsepower’s way of going about it is a sonically mutant, godly thing.