Fourth album from highly-praised Denver 4-piece extends their bleak worldview.

Like the title implies, 16HP are trawling through a mythical version of American music, sort of the aural equivalent of the Italian spaghetti western films, where outsiders take on Americana and turn it into something else entirely.

While the band is American, two members are French and it is this element that gives the band the necessary perspective. There are surface similarities to the likes of Nick Cave but there's also a spinechilling Appalachian mountain fog hanging over the whole affair.

It's not often that you would hear a banjo-driven version of trad folk song "Wayfaring Stranger", especially rendered in the style of Dock Boggs, the primal white bluesman of the 1930s, who, like 16 Horsepower, dealt in songs of murder, infanticide, God and madness.

David Eugene Edwards' voice has all of those desirably disturbing elements; he possesses the correct solemn cast for this sort of material but he doesn't go in for hysterics or even monotone chanting.

He seems to veer between reserved emotion and a bluesy quaver, which makes the music effortlessly modern, even though the album is steeped in more than a hundred years of yellowed papers, familial curses and hair-plucking gothic drama.

3 ½ stars (out of 5)