Micah P Hinson And The Nothing
Album: Micah P Hinson And The Nothing
Label: Talitres
Tracks: 13
Website: http://www.facebook.com/micahphinson

The back story to this new album by Micah P Hinson is quite extraordinary. Micah wrote the songs before suffering a bad car accident whilst touring in Spain in 2011.As a result of the crash, he lost the use of his arms and doctors feared that he might never regain the use of them. Determined to carry on with his album, Micah sent the demos that he had made before the accident to various musician friends, including The Twilight Sad and his Texan side-kick T Nicholas Phelps. With their help, Micah began to build the tracks, despite not having the use of his arms. Mercifully, Micah did regain the use of his arms and went back to Spain to complete the album that became "Micah P Hinson And The Nothing". The fact that the album was made at all is astonishing but despite all of the adversity, Micah has created a remarkable album. As Micah says "A grand amount of time and a grand amount of love was put into every song".

How to describe Micah's music? Imagine if Tom Waits had come from Texas and/or Nashville , then you might come close. Like Waits, his voice is somewhat gruff and like Waits, he is a great wordsmith. But there any similarity ends as Micah's songs are highly individual and quite clearly very personal, having been described as "winsome tales of love, loss and regret" which are given added poignancy by the use of traditional country music instruments such as pedal steel guitar and banjo.

There are some extraordinary songs here. There's the eerie "Sons of the USSR", which tells the very odd tale of Mr. Dimitry and his interest in photography !

Micah's stoicism and determination resonate through the impossibly slow piano ballad "I Ain't Movin'", in which he makes it clear that nothing will persuade him to change. He affectionately details the ups and downs of his grandfather's life in the pedal steel-driven country shuffle "The Life, Living, Death and Dying of a Certain and Peculiar L.J. Nichols" and employs some vari-speed bluegrass-style banjo picking on "There's Only One Name", in which Micah reveals that there is only one name that he wears on his heart and it will always be there [we are not told whose name it is, however].

One of the most extraordinary songs is "God is Good" in which Micah tells how he feels abandoned by Jesus, by his one true love and by his Pa, all of whom have left him, to the accompaniment of a weeping pedal steel. This contrasts with the slightly more upbeat and optimistic "Love Wait For Me" in which Micah implores his love to wait for him as he will shortly be coming home.

The album proper ends with the impossibly sad "A Million Miles Away" which features some other -worldly sounds [from a musical saw, perhaps?], a choir and a string quartet. However, there is a hidden bonus track, the sparse, spooky "The Crosshairs", which sounds as though a Cossack chorus has joined in song part way through.

The Sunday Times made this record their "Album of the Week" recently and I can understand why. Micah P Hinson has created an extraordinary piece of work and the fact that he did so without the use of his arms makes it an even more remarkable achievement.

Peter Cowley