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Your support makes all the difference.Of all the bands thrown up by the alt.country boom, Sixteen Horsepower are surely the most determinedly antique in attitude; the singer, David Eugene Edwards, grasping the roots-music staples of love, death and misery so intently to his bosom that it's almost as if he's making up for missing out on the chance to sell his soul to the devil down at the crossroads. Folklore is a warm but windswept wasteland of an album, with songs from various native traditions – Tuvan and Hungarian alongside American – interspersed with original 16HP material so authentic in tone and spirit that you can't tell the trad from the new. The opening "Hutterite Mile" is grim dustbowl balladry with stealthy gusts of harmonica, pious organ and keening fiddle combining to such weatherbeaten effect that you can all but hear the screen-door banging in the wind. On "Blessed Persistence", Edwards's black-dog emptiness is stalked by the menacing twang of a lonely guitar, with doomy cellos and skeletal xylophone, while elsewhere a Cormac McCarthy-esque air of primality seethes beneath the surface of "Beyond the Pale". A suitably jolly version of the Carter Family's sly anti-marital propaganda "Single Girl" provides a welcome respite from the pervasive gloom, although the most interesting tracks are those on which the American modes absorb foreign influences, such as the mazurka "La Robe à Parasol" done cajun style.
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