Micah P. Hinson Micah P. Hinson & The Opera Circuit

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Rating: 2.5/5

Styles: country-noir, Americana
Others: Leonard Cohen, Mark Lanegan

I’m not too sure about Micah P. Hinson. There’s just something about him I don’t trust. Sure, he went through some shit as a teenager (who didn’t?), including… well, mainly dating a Vogue cover model cum stripper. The model turned him on to the joys of narcotics, which led to Hinson serving time in jail for forging prescriptions. He was subsequently disowned by his Christian family.

The first hint that made me question his authenticity was a line in the press release, where, within a description of his almost broke-back physical condition during the recording of his second full-length, he mentions that having to “piss sitting down for a while [was] basically a living nightmare.” Um… over half the planet pees sitting down all the time and most of those people don’t bitch about it. Personally, I quite enjoy it; that’s review reading time for Filmore. Perhaps that’s taken out of context, but next to a short UNCUT interview, the picture becomes a little clearer. There, he muses that his so dubbed “Black Widow” Vogue ex might have “got impregnated by a grass dealer… [and] was getting her child taken away from her due to her love affair with prescription drugs. She must have fallen off the end of the earth or been swallowed alive by her pill bottle.” He, himself, has had “love affairs” with prescription drugs, but I bet he’d call those “living nightmares.” His pain is obviously so much more painful than anyone else’s. It appears to be his thing.

His string-led country-noir is not as musically interesting as Tom Waits’ or even Mark Lanegan’s, his lyrics aren’t nearly as poetic as Leonard Cohen’s, and his delivery is not even close to being as believable as Nick Drake’s, but those are the people he thinks he is among. It’s not that The Opera Circuit doesn’t sound pleasant, or that his lyrics aren’t solid; they just don’t hit me as being all that moving or even mildly engaging. It’s a question of motivation and integrity, and I find Hinson a little hard to believe most of the time.

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