Firstly, just to clear up the Micah P. Hinson pronunciation debate that’s been raging for, what, aeons now, it’s pronounced My-cah (that’s ‘my’ as in ‘My Family’, the bloody awful sitcom starring Robert Lindsay and ‘cah’ as in Ul…rika…Johnsson, erm, the former Swedish celebrity). Also worth noting is the little dot after the ‘P’ there; as music nerds we appreciate that getting an artist’s name wrong is of course deeply cretinous. The Pixies, The Pixies – what are you, some sort of Holocaust denier or something!?
Ahem, Hinson is a Texan singer-songwriter who remains, scandalously as far as I’m concerned, on the fringes of most people’s critical radar. Perhaps because when anyone who vaguely comes under the already saturated all-encompassing “alt-country” tag doesn’t immediately grab you by the testicles it’s easy to dismiss them as also rans. Paradoxically in fact, it’s often the case that with these kind of artists, perseverance rewards. And Micah P. Hinson, and this album, is no different.
Despite the lack of press release citing Hinson’s tumultuous back story or some current crippling physical ailment or other and aligned with the fact he proposed to his girlfriend on stage last last year at London’s Union Chapel, it’s perhaps surprising Hinson still wallows happily in yearning melancholy. Or maybe not. "Constantly craving what isn’t mine", he sings with forlorn anguish on the quite wonderful ‘Tell Me It Ain’t So’. Hinson’s lugubrious drawl is in typically fine fettle here but he seems to have upped the ante somewhat in terms of instrumentation. Only ‘The Fire Came Up To My Knees’ is significantly stripped back and pointedly the album’s weakest track. Undoubted highlight ‘I Keep Havin’ These Dreams’ begins with bare acoustic picking but slowly layers of accordion, violin and cello are added to what becomes a rich and warm concoction. The previously un-chartered use of organ, too, provides a backbone to a number of tracks here not least on the positively Butlins friendly ‘We Won’t Have To Be Lonesome Tonight’. It’s still the same old Micah in essence though. The songs veer between trademark lullaby-esque simplicity and more traditional sounding arrangements; his typically terse and sad yet hopeful refrains striving for resonance through basic repetition such as: “Oh love of my life” on ‘Sunrise Over The Olympus Mons’. Other standouts include the banjo lead thigh slapping ‘When We Embraced’ and the brief but beautiful ‘Throw the Stone’ which recalls the spidery finger picking of one of his previous Leonard Cohen-ish numbers ‘Beneath the Rose’.
Despite a couple of duds in the middle of the record, fans of Hinson will find plenty to enjoy here; personally I think it tops …and the Opera Circuit but doesn’t quite reach the heights of …and the Gospel of Progress if you, like me, like to order your albums of preference in such a way. Hinson closes out the album with the quite heartbreaking denouncement: “I’m not afraid of the sunset or the rain / I’m just afraid of dying alone” encapsulating perfectly the bittersweet and candid raw beauty of his music.
