Micah P Hinson - '...And The Pioneer Saboteurs' (Full Time Hobby)

On Micah P Hinson's fourth album, 'Micah P Hinson and the Pioneer Saboteurs', he's taken a prompt from Walt Whitman, the Grandfather poet to the American nation and his poem 'Pioneers! O pioneers!' as a means of getting to grips with the U.S. of A. that he feels stood for something, idealistically, and is nevertheless going to rack and ruin. His signature monochromatic album sleeve is supplanted by a feisty gun-tottin'-chick, and the band line-up has shuffled (Mark E Smith fashion), bearing the name the Pioneer Saboteurs - there's clearly something fomenting in Hinson's psyche.

Whether the Pioneer Saboteurs really are molotov-wielding apparatchiks as Hinson makes out - "with their hearts set to rabid" - it's nevertheless at odds with the baroque-string symphonic airs they gather, furnishing a lush contrast to Hinson's bittersweet verse and reverb tendencies. Salvation as an artistic path is a concurrent Hinson theme and has helped to shape his life beyond the penitentiary. For us, dear listener, the totems of hope and redemption loom large whilst Hinson himself ensures the pitch is gruff (TM) and the verse idiosyncratic.

The pilot single 'Take Off That Dress For Me' is prototypical - a tainted Roy Orbison-esque ditty where desire trammels the quest to maintain personal morals - "...and the world spins round/ and I don't care anymore...". Hinson's power and song craft are his calling card and the homage was made to his peers on his cover album 'All Dressed Up and Smelling Of Strangers' (2009), and on the baroque ballad 'The Letter At Twin Weeks' we find Hinson sat at the right hand of Orbison/Waits/Cohen/Cave et al.

Let's get to the cookies! '2's and 3's' is caustic, mad and angular like a pan-American fluted pirate-song with reverb, string section and chants, it's gorgeously melodious as H. sings - "...goddam myself for making it all up..." - rovingly, hotdiggittydoggedly! 'My God My God' is a plea, a Dylan-esque/Bright Eyes-like magical nugget where lifes' bitter pill is served to a husband in loss of his wife, yet the a Balkan folk-song jauntiness of musical mirth and clenched teeth verse seem at odds with the weight of the lyrics. 

'Watchers, Tell Us Of The Night' seems altogether too discordant to get a state of the nation address across but makes up in spades with a bang/clang of percussion, riffing and seamless strings, and 'The Striking Before the Storm' builds a tempestuously baroque pirate-song, while the titular 'The Cross That Stole His Heart Away' makes for a potent, broody and desolate lament. 'The Hero Will Never Hang' cuts a mariachi tune that lacks the previous punch, but 'She's Building the Castles In Her Heart' is an assured lo-fi waltz that's dizzying, majestic and gorgeously long.

'Seven Horses Seen Of Through The Hours, Still Comes Another Day' plays it lush, at odds with Hinson's black lyrics of the parentally discarded - it's less an oddity, more a means of dramatisation where musical-juxta-lyrical contrasts abound - sweet melodies and lyrics that contain a maggot in the apple core; songs of the wilted rose. And so run the polarities of light and darkness, the one scant without the other. For Micah P Hinson, the dramatic tensions have proved to be his deepest and most musically daring work to date.