SACKCLOTH 'N' ASHES
(A&M)
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."
-- Matt Ashare
(Sixteen Horsepower open for the
Dirt Merchants
this Friday, May 3, upstairs at the
Middle East.)
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