16 Horsepower

What I learned from re-listening to 16 Horsepower and researching them online is that we are meant to take it all literally. Lead singer and founder David Eugene Edwards, from Colorado, is not messing around. His dad was a preacher and he apparently kicked several people out of the band for deviating from his stringent religious views. That makes the whole thing a little harder to swallow, but this band (especially Sackcloth and Ashes, their second and best album) was a huge influence on me in college when I was in an alt-country band. I loved the mix of the evilness that was previously associated with metal and the acoustic/country music that I had previously been leery of. Plus the instrumentation is super-interesting, with wheezy squeeze boxes and other rare acoustic instruments, but that sound does get a bit redundant. They got more folksy as they went, but then they broke up. They haven't done anything in a while, but they are now distributed by Alternative Tentacles - so you know it's good. This is still the best song, but I had not seen the video until this moment: