MICAH P. HINSON – THE PIONEER SABOTEURS

For his relatively tender years, it sure sounds like Micah P. Hinson has lived through a lot. His world-weary croon and fractured instrumentation create a frightening blend on this latest record from America’s “troubled troubadour”. Pioneer‘s songs are steeped in doubt, apathy, greed, disdain and aggression, but there is also a sense of hope lurking somewhere in his surprisingly beautiful melodies. Hinson’s music is a kind of disturbed country rock occupying the same insidiously human space as Tindersticks or Nick Cave, with some of the rollicking balladry of Marty Robbins or Johnny Cash. We begin with a triple-punch – a pastoral string section provides a recitative before the jail-cell lament of Take Off That Dress For Me and the psychedelic gospel ball-and-chain drag of 2’s and 3’s. There are clear Morricone moments such as the curious The Striking Before The Storm, and we hear the opening string leitmotif return for the moving The Letter At Twin Wrecks. Hinson is an enigmatic personality, and his records are veiled in a seductively filmic and ambiguous grime that lends his self-loathing chronicles an edge of class and grandeur. He creates and lives in his own modern mythology, and it’s admittedly alluring.

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