Micah P. Hinson: Micah P. Hinson and the Opera Circuit

Micah P. Hinson arrives trailing a drugstore cowboy background that landed him in jail; whatever he took from that experience, whether wisdom, regret, or qualudes, it seems to have served him well.

His new album, Micah P. Hinson and the Gospel of Progress, opens lonesome and lugubrious, like Leonard Cohen stranded on a prairie, and proceeds to sift through a thousand styles, assimilating them all into an album that’s both cohesive and immediately familiar.

Hinson is only 24, but his music is timeless. The music is, above all, patient. This is a good soundtrack for watching a cigarette burn down to the filter. He sings lullabies, jigs, cowboy songs, and indefinable hybrids, all in a romantically ragged voice that sounds like it was dipped in honey and dragged through the Mojave desert: sweet, dusty, and beat to hell.

He has two priceless talents: one for letting a song build organically, and the other for knowing exactly when a song is over. About nine of the eleven tracks deserve their own reviews, from the foot-stomping “Digging a Grave” to the south-of-the-border “Jackeyed” and the hoarse-voiced sing-a-long “It’s Been So Long.”

The album falters on the appropriately named “My Time Wasted,” which blurs some of Hinson’s emotional power with heavy electric guitar. But he recovers with two of his best songs.

“You’re Only Lonely” rises from an alien cabaret tune to a spiraling, pounding crescendo, with Hinson’s agonized voice slowly submerging beneath the chaos. The final track is the eerily hypnotic “Don’t Leave Me Now.” It includes one of his best lines: “[I] found the word digress and made it a home.” Near the end, the song is washed out in a cacophony of static from which only a hopeful coda of violin and cello lingers. Headphone listeners will then emerge, blinking and converted, into the sunlight.

This is not Hinson’s first album, and I, along every other Tom Waits fan searching for the Second Coming of the Grizzled One, will now be seeking out the others. Digression of this type will make a happy home.

- Tom Vale
Micah P. Hinson (Jade Tree)