Greatest Album of All Time of the Week: Secret South!

There's something about that old-timey typewriter font.

16 Horsepower came on the scene in 1996, when Nick Cave's Let Love In and Murder Ballads had been all the rage in goth-folk-alt-country-roots-blues-whatever-rock, with Sackcloth and Ashes, an album of backwoods revival tent snake handling old tyme religion so bleak, vaguely ominous and mordant the insistently jaded yet clueless 90soids must certainly have taken it for sneering pastiche, a bit of aren't-those-dueling-banjos-rubes-creepy-and-weird condescension. But by the time they rolled out Secret South something became clear to even the densest George Carlin fanboy: David Eugene Edwards and his posse of preachers weren't joking; they meant every word of their musical ministry.

"But Pat", you splutter, spit-soaked dorito fragments spraying all over your mustard-stained "Better a wolf of Odin than a lamb of God" T-shirt, its structural integrity strained to the maximum over your sparsely hairy, heaving moobs, "Christian music suuucks!" A refrain long overdue a righteous repudiation: Christian *lyrics* suck. Finding a Christian band whose verbal cogitations stretch beyond sounding horny for the Lord can be a penance in itself, but your humble blôggeur is equal to the challenge. Lordian Guard is downright stately epic metal, Batzz in the Belfry is atmospheric ethereal wave, and even the tiresomely over-maligned Stryper eventually dropped an album of straight bangers sans the crush-on-Christ cringe. But 16 Horsepower remains the highest water mark for divinely inspired, transportive musikino on the theme of almighty God.

You might have heard their rendition of well-worn standard "Wayfaring Stranger", which dips audaciously into dark ambient, but don't expect the whole album to plow the same deep furrow: "Clogger" leads the pack with a hard rock stomp, "Praying Arm Lane" awes with the inevitability of judgement, "Splinters" sounds like the eye of an almighty storm, and Bob Dylan cover "Nobody 'Cept You" exults with an energy straight from beyond the veil. Banjos, organs, squeezeboxes and more find their way in and out of the mix but there's not a hint of gimmickry left over from the first two, more theatrical, albums. Clear a space in your top ten, and get it now.