Album Review: Micah P Hinson All Dressed Up and Smelling of Strangers

'Mixed result covers set from gravel-voice folkie' - Micah P Hinson. Photo / Supplied

Rating: 3/5
Verdict: Mixed result covers set from gravel-voice folkie

If you've become enamoured of sombre-voiced American nu-folk troubador Hinson from his previous emotionally-racked albums, you might be looking forward to his next bunch of songs. This isn' it. There is a new studio set imminent, but this one is a stopgap set of covers, its evocative title kind of giving away the opshop origins of the contents. Thought if you didn't read the fine print it probably wouldn't be until his take on The Times Are A-Changin' makes it obvious about the hand-me-downs. That one's delivered fairly faithful as is Leonard Cohen's Suzanne straight after.

Elsewhere Hinson's gritty groan is offering rough sandings of old rock standards - his Running Scared certainly suggests David Lynch-ian terror, his Lonesome Tonight is surely painfully lonely, and his While My Guitar Gently Weeps could induce tears from those who treasure the original. He's also dusted off a couple country chestnuts (Patsy Cline's Stop the World and John Denver's This Old Guitar) as well as ye old folk blues of Ledbelly's In the Pines where Hinson adds grinding grunge guitars to the song famously covered by Nirvana on their unplugged album. But the album's make or break point is My Way which he gives such a groaning going-over that Sid Vicious, previous vandal of said anthem, is surely spinning in his grave at similar rpms to Sinatra.