Born in Memphis, Micah P. Hinson moved to Abilene, Texas, when he was just a child. As a teenager, he saw his share of trouble, falling in with a storybook femme fatale (a model and widow of a local rock musician, even) and serving a brief stint in county lock-up-- all before his twentieth birthday. This backstory, touted in his press materials, sounds almost too good to be true, but there's no reason to think it's any kind of fabrication. The point, besides, is not that Hinson has desert cred, but that his Tennessee-to-Texas trajectory parallels that of Willie Nelson and other outlaw country singers who fled Nashville for more sympathetic climes. Of course, Hinson isn't running from the mainstream, and he has no concentrated center against which to define himself, but he makes music-- specifically, his self-titled debut with the Gospel of Progress, a motley group that seemingly consists of any number of musicians playing twice as many instruments-- obviously on his own terms, which is less revolutionary today than it was thirty years ago, but still important.
His debut is, in some ways, similar to Nelson's Red-Headed Stranger: Both are concept albums about the painful dissolution of a relationship and the dire self-reckoning that inevitably follows. However, instead of going on a murderous spree across the range, Hinson's protagonist gets lost within himself: "I've been waiting so long up in these trees," he sings on "The Day Texas Sank to the Bottom of the Sea", "trying to hang myself with thoughts of you, thoughts of me." It's a vague metaphor with vaguely country-music wordplay, but it defines these songs as exorcisms of memory, music as a form of healing, or progress.
Lyrically, Hinson is a stark minimalist. These 14 songs are uniformly plain-spoken and concise, and they tend to repeat a phrase or a verse, worrying it until it becomes frayed around the edges. "Don't You" pulls apart a five-word plea\xD1"Don't you forget about me"-- until it's positively threadbare, and on "I Still Remember", Hinson and Sarah Lewes sing the same verse back and forth, changing only the pronouns to juggle the blame. This approach proves deceptively simple, playing up the ambiguity of so few words. On the album opener, "Close Your Eyes", he comforts a lover with sweet words: "Close you eyes and don't you make a sound/ There's no worries now, there's no one else around to hear you cry." But are these words really so innocent? Couldn't he just as likely be sending her to her death as to sleep, similar to the ambiguous beginning of Red-Headed Stranger?
Musically, this debut is lovingly and exactingly orchestrated with an array of instruments-- not just the usual piano, cello, and drums, but also flute, organ, melodica, and horns-- that subtly shade the songs' emotions. Strangely, however, Hinson entertains few possibilities and seems to rely too heavily on his acoustic guitar to shape the tracks. The opener, "Close Your Eyes", sets the general tone for the album, which (despite the apocalyptic chorus of "At Last, Our Promises") doesn't really break until track 10, "Patience", during which Hinson's imperturbably hangdog vocals reach a feverish holler and his anger spews forth.
Unfortunately, a few of the preceding tracks-- namely, "The Nothing" and "Stand in My Way"-- lose their distinctiveness and blur into each other, creating a mid-album lull that bends toward maudlin. After that respite, however, Hinson speeds the album to its gospel climax on "The Day Texas Sank to the Bottom of the Sea", which proves a near-perfect finale both musically and lyrically. The song's heavenward crescendo and the absolving catharsis both sound well-earned.
