Some music listeners of a particular aesthetic berate much of the current indie music scene for its amateurism and DIY hipness. Such listeners probably had no problem avoiding Micah P. Hinson and the Gospel of Progress upon its initial release ten years ago. It was put out on the tiny English indie label Sketchbook Records, the Texas songwriter’s musical accompanists were mostly culled from British musicians, and it was over there that Hinson found an appreciative audience for the record and year-long tour that followed.
Ten years on, anyone with a highly prescriptive sense of musicality or a cynical bent towards independent artists (I like to refer to such as “The 99 percent [of the internet]”) will find a catalog of criticism easily at hand with which to dismiss this re-release. Hinson’s singing voice is cracked and uneven; his guitar playing here is rudimentary; he doesn’t write fully realized songs so much as he sings lines; the recordings sound, oftentimes, like first takes, and errors are left in. Even the background story of the album’s creation, during which time Hinson struggled with drug addiction and alternating periods of homelessness and incarceration, sounds, to the cynical, like some carefully constructed bid for authenticity.
It’s too easy, I think, to cloak ourselves in such cynicism. It protects us from artist who challenge or contradict our carefully constructed self-identities and earns us ongoing membership in the point-and-judge electronic mob. Our electronic, hyper-linked existence makes it too easy to find ample reassurances of our own moral and physical superiority: we get to like half a dozen socially conscious causes on our friends’ Facebook pages before jumping over to Tumblr or Buzzfeed to laugh at the latest photo collection of badly dressed, overweight, poor people shopping at Walmart. We don’t know how to handle sincerity anymore.
Three hundred words in, and I haven’t really said a damn thing about the album, except, I think, maybe I have. At least, listening to Hinson’s beautiful, sincere debut record almost exclusively over the course of the past week has me thinking these things. This record shuns cynicism. It is, rather, an honest, romantic exploration of heartbreak wherein, despite his many accompanists, Hinson lies exposed and raw. Micah P. Hinson and the Gospel of Progress is an album where the sum of its many imperfections adds up to a damn near perfect listening experience.
“Close your eyes and don’t you make a sound” Hinson sings to open the album, “There’s no worries now, There’s no one else around / To hear you cry yourself to sleep again tonight.” His breaking, halting voice extends the lines, the song becoming, simply, a repetition of that single statement, with the rawness and anxiety in Hinson’s voice rising with each repeat. Hinson masterfully uses repetition to imbue the simple and direct lines of so many of this album’s thirteen songs (plus one bonus track) with weight and emotional depth. “Don’t You, Pt 1+2” finds Hinson repeating “Don’t you / forget about me” breaking the phrase and doubling each half to add an emphatic weight to what could sound like a clichéd line, a chorus of “ah-ahs” deepening the gloom. A perfect frame for the central claim of “The Possibilities”: “The possibilities are endless now. / The forecast, not so good.”
At Last, Our Promises” finds Hinson slowly evolving through stages of blame and self-incrimination at the dissolution of a relationship as “All our promises turned to shit.” This segment of the record crashes through the range of emotions brought on by the turmoil of love turning to hate and regret and, later, something like acceptance. “I Still Remember” contains the gorgeous reflection of “I still remember thinking / How lovely it would be / To hold you for eternity / Or at least until we fell asleep.” But good thoughts give way quickly, as Hinson sings later on the ironically titled “Patience”: “And I’m running out of patience / To be fucking with you now.” Later, on “You Lost Sight of Me”, Hinson pleads “Don’t lead me on / And don’t break my heart / You know it’s breakable / You know it’s sweet.” Album closer, “The Day Texas Sank to the Bottom of the Sea” provides the album’s emotional peak. “Here’s all that I have to give / I’ll admit it’s not a lot / But it’s all that I’ve got” he sings, pushing the thought onward, each seeming end to the statement evoking instead a continuation until the whole becomes a testimony of isolation. His final question, completed only after building through repetition: “Why can’t you see me?” The appended bonus cut “Can’t Change a Thing” is a thematically appropriate addition, but its beginning is prudently held a full 30 seconds to avoid treading upon the beautiful intensity of the album proper’s ending.
Comparisons can be dangerous, of course, but I hear, over and over in the intensity of Hinson’s performance and the honesty of his songwriting, parallels to Jason Molina, Mark Kozelek, and, especially, Simon Joyner. The ten-member Gospel of Progress, anchored by the Earlies’ Christian Madden, along with his brother Nicky and Richard Young (who would later record as Tokolosh) play with spontaneity, offering a deceptive brightness in places while in others creating a backdrop of brooding darkness evocative of Tindersticks.
This overlooked classic of the aughts, remastered and available for the first time in vinyl as well as CD format, deserves a wider audience.