Jason Molina - The Poet of Introversion

Among the many artists who over the past decade have helped revitalize and renew the American songwriting tradition, Jason Molina holds a place of undeniable importance - an author capable, like few others, of taking on very different sonic guises, always open to cross-contamination and the shifting shapes of his tormented songwriting.

His complex discography is in fact so varied, and so rich in collaborations - some of them quite daring - that the only real constants across his entire body of work turn out to be his writing and his voice, at once fragile and deep, while the musicians who accompanied him, and even the names under which his records were released (Songs: Ohia, Jason Molina, Magnolia Electric Co.), kept changing from one project to the next.

But even when his records came out under the guise of a band, the core was always him: Jason Molina, a songwriter born in Lorain, Ohio, whose musical beginnings took place in Richmond, where in the early Nineties he played bass in a handful of metal bands. In the meantime, the young Molina also amused himself recording self-produced cassettes, on which he was already channelling his restless spirit through bare, voice-and-guitar compositions. To one of these cassettes - which ended up in the hands of Will Oldham, who thought highly of it - Molina owes his actual musical birth, officially datable to 1996, with the release, fittingly on Palace Records, of the single "Nor Cease Thou Never Grow", two melancholy, bare-bones tracks very close to Oldham's style, put out under the moniker Songs: Ohia (a name tied both to a local mangling of the word Ohio and to an ornamental plant native to Hawaii, apparently pronounced simply "ia"), which would go on to accompany him through most of his subsequent work.

While this single, and the one that followed, "One Pronunciation Of Glory", already reveal Molina's gifts as a composer, highlighting both his lyricism and the intensity of his delivery, they still remain closely tied to extremely classic musical templates, close to those of his discoverer Will Oldham, and ideally placeable in the wake of countless alt-country records. Even the self-titled debut album by Songs: Ohia, released in 1997 on Secretly Canadian (the label to which Molina would tie his entire artistic career), retraces that same tradition across thirteen bedroom electro-acoustic ballads - bare-bones yet romantic - that reveal an uncommon, if still slightly unripe, musical sensibility.

The tracks on the debut album are invariably understated in tone and timid in their compositional approach - not without warmth, certainly, but seemingly more concerned with building clean songs than with pushing beyond an otherwise valid take on classic American songwriting. Even so, tracks like "Cabwailingo", "Dogwood Gap" and "Little Beaver" already hint at the seeds of an intense, far-from-trivial compositional style, one that would come fully into its own on the following album, Impala, where Molina begins to drift further, lyrically too, from alt-country conventions. You can hear it right away on that record's opening track, "Gambling Man", a slow, nearly eight-minute elegy that already contains all the traits for which Molina would become most beloved: melancholy, intimate singing over suspended atmospheres of great emotional intensity.

Yet this doesn't mean Molina suddenly abandoned his musical roots: on the contrary, even as his voice grows more assured and more finely modulated, and the sonic settings become more varied and refined, the landscapes of the American tradition remain a constant backdrop - sometimes taking centre stage in his compositions ("45 Degrees", "Anchors"), sometimes barely glimpsed, folded into a complex musical sensibility that ranges widely between traditional songwriting, "indie" suggestions and romantic lyricism.

So if the debut album was still, if anything, too tied to the influence of his musical godfather Will Oldham, Impala can rightly be regarded as the true artistic prelude to Molina the author and singer - still perhaps a little green, but by now able to stand on his own two feet and forge an authentic, recognizable musical style.

Molina's growing confidence and artistic definition decisively widened his musical horizons: now that his name was starting to make a mark on the indie and alt-country scene, Songs: Ohia began taking on the shape of an actual band, opening up to various collaborations and experiences through which he would travel paths more or less parallel to his musical origins - always, however, answering to nothing but his own creator's thirst for discovery, a man as wary of producers as he was willing to constantly question himself.

It's 1999, the year Axxess & Ace came out: nine intensely personal songs, almost all dealing with love, mostly recorded live, featuring the warm, soft voice of Edith Frost and instrumental support from musicians active in some of Chicago's most respected bands, such as Rex, Pinetop Seven and Boxhead Ensemble. On these tracks, the sound becomes more structured and incisive than on his earliest work, while Molina's own singing - beautifully set off by Frost's on "Love Leaves Its Abuser" and "Captain Badass" - gains in fluidity and lyricism, growing more intense and deep, showing real emotional investment in the lyrics, as on "Captain Badass" and "Come Back To Your Man".

The result is a general step up in immediacy: where before there were only simple songs, timid and drowsy, there are now intense ballads aiming to draw the listener in, both musically and emotionally. And that aim is achieved in nearly every track, among which the graceful rhythms of "Captain Badass" and the intense violin of "Come Back To Your Man" and "Champion" deserve a special mention - even if rougher, less fully formed moments still crop up here and there ("Hot Black Silk", "Redhead").

But Molina is by now an artist far removed – in approach, if not in mood – from the shy, awkward kid of his early musical days, spent almost in contemplation of the sacred monsters of American songwriting, from Bob Dylan to Will Oldham, by way of Neil Young. By this point Molina has a clearly defined musical identity, framed by his quietly anguished delivery and his distinctive way of playing guitar (an electric with an acoustic-like character, often turned into a baritone guitar by using only the four lowest strings).

It's 2000, the critical spotlight is on the so-called "post-rock," and Molina feels confident enough to experiment with new musical horizons in his songwriting and playing: he does so over the course of the year with two albums, strikingly different from one another, made with the help of truly unexpected collaborators. For the first, The Lioness, he relocates to Scotland, where he works side by side with Alasdair Roberts (Appendix Out) and, above all, with Aidan Moffat and David Gow (Arab Strap), whose contribution is so substantial that the album could almost be credited as a shared authorship.

The fruit of this bold collaboration is nine tracks of extraordinary intensity, in which the dark, northern-European atmospheres of Arab Strap find a perfect balance with the lyricism of the American songwriter – relatively more sun-lit, yet marked by a not-dissimilar sensibility, naturally prone to anguished introspection, evident here in spare, vibrant electro-acoustic ballads whose pace is measured only in appearance. From them radiates an inner tension that Molina's voice can barely contain in the gaps between one note and the next, sometimes just before the guitars take over the scene in harsh, tear-jerking crescendos ("The Black Crow," "Tigress"), or before the organ cloaks his compositions in dramatic solemnity.

The heart of the record still lies in its aching ballads ("Being In Love," "Lioness," "Just A Spark"), which lay bare the twists of love in anything but a banal way, without easy sentimental concessions, giving a clear sense of what drives Molina's restless spirit in his urgent need for writing and musical expression. Perhaps that is exactly why The Lioness remains the absolute peak of his discography, reached also through the courage to question himself, both as a man and as an artist, in order to explore different musical experiences while keeping intact – indeed, bringing to their fullest expression – his gifts as a writer and performer. The excellent 2018 deluxe reissue, titled Love & Work: The Lioness Sessions, brings with it another 11 wonderful unreleased songs.

The other album born of a similar conceptual matrix, Ghost Tropic, recorded in near-total isolation and again featuring contributions from Alasdair Roberts and members of Lullaby For The Working Class, doesn't quite reach the same heights of excellence. The album represents Molina's own highly personal take on deconstructed sounds, broadly in line with the minimalism and post-rock experimentation so fashionable at the time, showcasing the enormous versatility of a songwriter clearly unwilling to be filed away solely among the countless ranks of alt-country singer-songwriters. Molina's artistic gifts, to be clear, allow him not to be entirely overwhelmed by the bold gamble of stepping into sonic "clothes" so far removed from his original musical sensibility, even if doing so requires him to channel his emotional charge through the many suspended passages shaped by stretched-out soundscapes dotted with percussion, vibraphones, and even the ghostly sampled echoes of the two (unnecessary) instrumental interludes that give the record its title.

Perhaps the departure from more orthodox modes of expression is, here, too abrupt and disorienting even for the artist himself, whose precious lyrical vein, however forcefully it resurfaces here and there ("Body Burned Away" and "Ocean's Nerves"), ends up scattering into extremely bare, hypnotic atmospheres, oscillating between ambient fascinations and unsettling slow-motion litanies ("Not Just a Ghost's Heart" and "Incantation," twelve minutes each) that come across as personal, and not especially thrilling, reinterpretations of the dark folk of Current 93.

A year marked by the release of two demanding albums (plus the extremely limited tour-cd Protection Spells) is followed by one with no official releases at all, during which, however, the tireless Jason still finds time to put together plenty of interesting material, once again testing himself as he lays the groundwork for his future work. Evidence of this can be heard in the live recording, made during the 2000 Italian tour, of the eight tracks on Mi Sei Apparso Come Un Fantasma, on which Molina not only sets aside his baritone guitar in favor of a standard six-string, but is for the first time backed by a stable band, ready to translate his ideas into music, in a style far more traditional than that of his most recent albums.

If Ghost Tropic had marked the point furthest removed from the beginnings of his musical journey, the follow-up, Didn't It Rain, reverses course, bringing Molina back to songwriting that is as intense and melancholy-soaked as ever, but now once again set on classic tracks, carefully built from a weave of folk, blues and country. But even though the ingredients of his musical formula are well known by now, Didn't It Rain ends up cementing the reputation of an artist and a band capable of going beyond mere nostalgic rummaging through dusty sonic antiques – which the album's live, direct-to-tape recording might suggest – and instead pushing forward, not without courage, a modernization of the alt-country blueprint, fully achieved here through elegant, slow-paced, understated ballads that bring out Molina's human warmth and interpretive lyricism. Thus, "Cross The Road, Molina" and "Ring The Bell" are spare blues ballads, stripped of their potential rawness and translated into a musical language of great romantic sensitivity, lending them a precious intimate quality, somewhere between echoes of Oldham and inspirations drawn from Smog or Red House Painters. "Steve Albini's Blues" and the closing "Blue Chicago Moon," meanwhile, feel like personal reworkings of classic Neil Young-style ballads, built around a handful of guitar chords and backed by a flawless rhythm section that gives the tracks a codeine-like haze, perfectly suited to the unwavering pessimism of Molina's lyrics, still centered on desolation, loneliness and abandonment, yet somehow also open to the glimmer of hope that flickers at the end of "Blue Chicago Moon" and finds expression too in the emotional crescendo of "Blue Factory Flame" and in the enchanting vignette "Two Blue Lights," where Jennie Benford's crisp, raspy voice stands out.

Having by now settled into this highly personal stylistic signature, within a few months Molina releases, under his own name or the band's, various singles and collaborations, among which, still in 2002, one in particular stands out: his own contribution, with a couple of slow, almost motionless dirges, to the Amalgamated Sons Of Rest project, alongside Alasdair Roberts and his old "mentor" Will Oldham – next to whom Molina's name now shines with a light of its own, clearly standing as an equal.

But already the following year Molina shuffles the deck once again, with a record whose electric-blues character is evident from the title alone, The Magnolia Electric Co.. The album marks yet another of the many turning points in Molina's career, first and foremost the substantial retirement of the "Songs: Ohia" moniker that had accompanied him since his debut. To avoid confusion, label Secretly Canadian continues to credit the album to Songs: Ohia for the sake of a kind of artistic continuity, even though there is no trace of the old moniker anywhere in the album's artwork – indeed, the artist himself credits it to the new lineup, which takes its name from the record itself.

Formal questions aside, however, The Magnolia Electric Co., produced by Steve Albini, draws Molina even closer to the blues and country roots of American song, this time in a much harsher, more direct way than on his previous albums. Whatever you want to call it, Magnolia Electric Co. is first and foremost an actual band, made up of the musicians who had backed him on the tour during which Mi Sei Apparso Come Un Fantasma was recorded; joining them for the occasion are other collaborators, such as English songwriter Scout Niblett, whose delivery – at once sweet and obliquely quivering – enriches "Peoria Lunch Box Blues," one of the most intense and best-realized tracks on the record.

That The Magnolia Electric Co. is a very different album from its predecessors is clear from the very first electric-guitar riff of the opening track, "Farewell Transmission," which already radiates an electric, bluesy adrenaline never before heard so explicitly in the Lorain songwriter's career. The rest of the album does nothing to contradict the impression made by that opening track: The Magnolia Electric Co. can easily be seen as Molina's own take on the blues of its origins, filtered through its various expressive registers. Thus, the raw guitars of "I've Been Riding With The Ghost" point explicitly to Neil Young, "Just Be Simple" follows in the footsteps of classic singer-songwriting that readily calls to mind the ballads of Bob Dylan, while "The Old Black Hen" casts the band into atmospheres of classic, old-school blues, much closer to the Black American tradition than to the songwriting of the previous decade's singer-songwriters. It should be stressed, however, that throughout all this Molina always leaves his own mark, never content to simply deliver a straightforward "tribute," since tracks like "John Henry Split My Heart" and the excellent "Almost Was Good Enough" pour out that emotional charge barely held in check in the more measured compositions of his earlier work. Even so, his taste for slowness and acoustic bareness hasn't disappeared, as shown by the bonus-cd included only with the first copies of the album, which collects home recordings of the album's songs, performed by Molina with nothing but a guitar: these are versions of extreme bareness that reconnect with the artist's finest intimate approach and, in almost every case, end up doing greater justice to songs whose inspired writing feels perhaps a little shortchanged within the electric framework of the official album.

Taken on its own, The Magnolia Electric Co. is still a good record, not without its share of inspired moments, and can be filed under one of Molina's many musical detours, although, in light of what followed, it might also be seen as the first sign of his drift into electric, nostalgia-driven territory.

Before fully settling into the role of bluesman, however, Molina still manages to showcase his sensitivity and talent for writing songs that are spare and simple, yet able to speak straight to the heart. Picking up where the acoustic versions of the The Magnolia Electric Co. tracks left off, the former Songs: Ohia releases the album conceived in the meantime to form, together with its predecessor, a true diptych, Pyramid Electric Co., almost seeming to enjoy once again throwing his loyal fans off balance, starting with the record's unusual format: vinyl with an accompanying CD containing identical content. Pyramid Electric Co. is light years away from the electric energy of its immediate predecessor, recorded as it is in complete solitude, with nothing but a guitar and a piano, both played by Molina himself – just as Jason Molina himself takes full personal responsibility for the record: it is in fact the only album of his career to be released simply under his own first and last name, and the seven tracks it contains make clear right away why. They are, in essence, a stripped-down portrait of the pain underlying Molina's musical inspiration, in which compositional intimacy worthy of Oldham at his best is paired with a spare, stretched-out sonic habitat, whose murky tones express, without mediation or easy self-indulgence, a melancholy and at times desperate spirit – always lurking beneath his recent electric binges and, ultimately, far more fully conveyed in these songs.

Pyramid Electric Co. is a brave, difficult album, one that reveals both the extraordinary abilities and the limits of its author, yet reaches extraordinary peaks of emotional intensity through notes slowly distilled by the interplay of acoustic and electric guitar on tracks like "Division St. Girl," "Spectral Alphabet," or through the evocative piano of "Red Comet Dust."

But the electric turn taken by The Magnolia Electric Co. is a decisive one and, at least for the time being, there's no going back: now a stable outfit, the new band cements its sound on the following tour, during which Molina makes no room at all for his pained acoustic side, instead favoring, alongside his new travel companions, performances built on small and large blues tempos, offering shows with an old-fashioned flavor and an impetuous sonic impact, reinterpreting according to this new (or old?) sensibility the few songs from his earlier catalog that lend themselves to such treatment, and above all road-testing live the band's future repertoire.

It was during this very tour that Trials & Errors was recorded — not simply a live album, but the explicit testimony of the drastic change of register Molina had imposed on his career. Of the Songs: Ohia catalog, only three songs are revisited here, in heavily electrified versions, while the remaining seven tracks are new compositions, some of which were destined to remain available only in this live form.

The shift, even sharper here than on The Magnolia Electric Co., is evident from the first two tracks, “Dark Don’t Hide It” and “Don’t This Look Like The Dark”, which attempt to reconcile Dylan-esque ballads with a traditional blues approach, topped off by an all-too-obvious debt to Neil Young. Even Molina's voice, though the lyrics still carry his usual dark themes, drops its customary subdued, pained tone to take on the assertive timbre of a bluesman, one forced to hold his own against the sonic weight of abrasive guitars and a relentless rhythm section.

The length of the tracks (always over five minutes) only weighs the listening experience down further, scattering much of Molina's expressive lyricism and compositional skill, as becomes especially clear in the reworkings of songs already released under Songs: Ohia. But those days are now just a distant memory: Magnolia Electric Co. is nothing more than a conventional big band, content to showcase the undeniable technical chops of its members along well-worn paths rather than forge anything authentically personal. It's no coincidence that the only tracks to rise above derivative mediocrity are the two featuring, as their sole original touch, Mike Kapinus's trumpet: “Leave The City” and “The Last 3 Human Words”, a genuine gem in the desert, where heightened compositional tension strikes a balanced chord with a slower, more intricate dramatic unfolding, capable of reaching levels of pathos never even approached elsewhere on the record, yet still far from the heights of The Lioness, and equally far from the more recent, anguished introspection of Pyramid Electric Co..

Hopes that Trials & Errors would remain just an isolated episode, a kind of electric live divertissement, are then thoroughly dashed by the subsequent studio effort What Comes After The Blues, on which the band presses on down its questionable path, delivering eight predictable tracks in which Molina's personality and tormented musical sensibility are barely visible anymore, having dissolved into a composite anonymity that has replaced the arid darkness of Songs: Ohia's inspired work with an oppressive barrage of clattering guitars, heavy-handed rhythms and pointless virtuosity.

But just when Jason Molina's talent seemed to have mysteriously evaporated, Magnolia Electric Co. close out their bleakest year, 2005 (which saw the release of both albums), with at least a small glimmer of hope for what's to come, in the shape of the roughly twenty minutes of the EP Hard To Love A Man: four tracks plus the title track, already released on What Comes After The Blues, of which it was, incidentally, the least unsuccessful moment. On the EP, the band finally slows down the overly relentless pace of its recent work, carefully crafting an old-fashioned-sounding folk-rock still prone to the odd nostalgic lapse, as shown by the cover of Warren Zevon's “Warewolves Of London”, but overall calmer than the previous albums and not without a melancholy echo of the Axxess & Ace days, as in the excellent piano-led melodic openings of “Bowery”.

Granted, in such lean times even a fairly mediocre EP can be welcomed as a positive sign, since it steers Molina back toward musical territory better suited to his poetic vein, where his artistic talent can undoubtedly move with greater agility, as he has shown many times before in the abrupt changes of direction throughout his career: once you've hit bottom, the only way is up, and the road back, however long and difficult, already seems to have been taken. If the emotional pathos and the willingness to question himself haven't entirely deserted him, then it's still reasonable to expect Molina to prove wrong those who may have too hastily written him off as just another hardened, dust-covered nostalgic clinging to music whose time has passed.

After the electric binge, Molina sheds the bluesman's clothes once more to retreat into a deeply personal artistic isolation, shaping, with nothing but guitar and piano, Let Me Go Let Me Go Let Me Go (2006): nine deeply felt tracks, once again able to bring out his moving gifts as both writer and performer.

The emphasis placed on the vinyl format and the homespun quality of the recordings is no mere aesthetic choice, but a device Molina uses to further stretch out the already bare sonics and the handful of chords accompanying his voice. The crepuscular intimacy draped over the whole record is apparent from the first few piano notes and the hushed acoustic touches that, on “It’s Easier Now”, frame Molina's voice at its most expressive peak of unwavering melancholy. But unlike “Pyramid Electric Co.”, uniformly marked by catatonic ballads, “Let Me Go Let Me Go Let Me Go” offers more variety, at least in terms of structure: the guitar sound isn't limited to a few scattered notes, but at times takes on a rounder shape, sketching out slightly more defined harmonies.

Although nearly all the songs are still pared down to the bone, the real novelty of this album — at least for Molina the "solo artist" — lies in the greater attention paid to rhythm, driven simply by the voice even before the chords (“Everything Should Try Again”), or by a brief, dissonant and decidedly over-the-top guitar solo on an otherwise dark track like “Some Things Never Try”.

The final three tracks deserve separate mention, as their pronounced yet still slow compositional movement turns into the harsh, listless repetition of a sampled beat, barely offset by a few guitar touches (“Get Out Get Out Get Out”) or by a handful of crooked piano and organ notes (“It Costs You Nothing”), over which Molina comes close to screaming his despair, achieving a result of great fascination and emotional intensity.

Almost simultaneously with the release of Let Me Go Let Me Go Let Me Go, Molina also reappears in his electric incarnation, with Magnolia Electric Co. Yet, although the album belongs within the band's artistic trajectory, the centrality of Molina's figure within it, combined with certain shared traits of inspiration, makes it tempting to think of the two records as almost “twins”.

Fading Trails is a lean record (nine tracks, with a total running time under half an hour), marked by a rediscovered, measured yet intense tone, and above all free of the redundant rough edges of the band's previous work. But not everything has changed, since here too the natural tendency toward an unmistakable, old-fashioned electric blues remains intact — though finally placed in the service of Molina's well-known songwriting gifts, his deep lyricism once again finding expression in sparer, more linear compositions, their outlines barely sketched in by an instrumental component that is still very “classic” but this time never intrusive.

Two thirds of the album can indeed rightly be considered made up of Molina's usual ballads — not all that far removed from those on the last albums released as Songs: Ohia — with the voice brought back to the fore and shifting harmonic structures, marked by a discreet, delicate blues approach, often set against the piano, as on the choral electric miniature (a hundred seconds long) “Montgomery”. The blues form remains unchanged, but the tempo slows further still and the tones grow even more muted, marking a clear reversal from the recent harshness, despite the underlying continuity of expressive paradigm.

The radical break with the previous albums is, however, even more evident on the three tracks where the band actually disappears altogether, leaving the stage to Jason Molina alone: first on “The Old Horizon”, a dark gem of intimate introspection built solely on the intensity of his voice and a few measured piano notes, and then on two minimal guitar-and-voice ballads, their structures only slightly more developed than those of the skeletal compositions found on Let Me Go Let Me Go Let Me Go.

Although it never reaches sublime heights, Fading Trails at least has the merit of restoring Molina, even when flanked by the band, to an artistic coherence that throughout his career has grappled with various musical forms, and here he finally manages to play with the blues without betraying the traits of his tried-and-tested songwriting qualities. The same result is achieved by the massive four-CD-plus-DVD collection titled Sojourner, which follows a year after the last two "twin" albums, gathering into a single box four different sessions of both released and unreleased tracks, recorded by Molina either solo or with the help of various musicians.

Two of the four CDs, “Nashville Moon” and “Sun Session”, again present the band's more electric and bluesy (and less convincing) side, as expressed on Trials & Errors and What Comes After The Blues, some of whose songs are presented here in a slightly stripped-down form, revealing a melodic side that in those works was smothered under a stinging electric blanket. The basic approach, however, remains deeply influenced by fascinations with that most classic folk-blues, a mode in which Molina's lyricism has already proven unable to express itself at its best, here only tempered by a somewhat greater deliberation in the instrumental approach. It's no coincidence that the best tracks continue to be those drawn from “Fading Trails” and the EP “Hard To Love A Man”, alongside the unreleased “Texas 71” and “Down The Wrong Road Both Ways”. Yet even in these tracks it's evident how Molina tends to slow the rhythms and strip the compositions of much of the electric scaffolding of the original versions, as perfectly demonstrated by the version of “Hold On Magnolia”, poised almost halfway between the one on the album The Magnolia Electric Co. and the acoustic one performed solo by Molina on the bonus CD included with that same record.

The other two CDs included in Sojourner, on the other hand, go beyond anything the band had shown up to that point: on “The Black Ram” (for which Molina enlisted a completely overhauled lineup, including, among others, Andrew Bird and Rick Alverson), not only are most of the tracks previously unreleased, but the contribution of these collaborators lends a more composed feel and muffled settings to compositions in which the Lorain singer-songwriter's pained intimacy is able to shine through. Not that Molina abandons dry rhythms and electric edges, but they're now aimed at creating mournful atmospheres, tempered by Andrew Bird's gentle acoustic textures on tracks such as the splendid “What’s Broken Becomes Better” and “Will-O-The-Wisp”.

The final CD, “Shohola”, presents Molina once again in complete solitude, working with nothing but voice and guitar in a session of barely twenty-five minutes, picking up right where Fading Trails left off, namely with the two minimal ballads “Steady Now” and “Spanish Moon Fall & Rise”, followed by six more tracks: spare but perfectly realized acoustic sketches, in which Molina's usual spleen comes across in a less dark-toned way than on his other "solo" albums.

Although “Shohola” deserves to be considered somewhat separately from the rest of Sojourner, it's precisely here and on “The Black Ram” that the collection's most significant moments can be found — not a mere summa of the last three years of Jason Molina's artistic journey, but testimony to his commitment to recovering a folk-blues classicism that, once the rough edges of Magnolia Electric Co.'s early works are smoothed away, once again embraces the plainspoken honesty of his songwriting, all the more emphasized by tracks of understated essentiality, in both acoustic and electric guise.

Yet another chapter in Jason Molina's long career coincides with the fifth record under the Magnolia Electric Co. name, marking his return to album format after three years.

Josephine, conceived as a concept album about the solitude and desperation of desire, is heavily marked by its dedication to bassist Evan Farrell — already a member of Rogue Wave as well as a full-fledged member of the band on its final tours — who tragically passed away in December 2007.

The strong bond established with the inspiration underlying the album, combined with Molina's usual brooding mood, define Josephine far more than its production, once again entrusted to Steve Albini, whose influence is nonetheless barely perceptible, overshadowed as it is by the Lorain singer-songwriter's grieving spirit and his by-now consolidated leaning toward expressive classicism.

The structure of the album's fourteen tracks tends to balance Molina's new/old spirit with the unmistakable attack of his voice and a songwriting style that still bears personal hallmarks within a heartfelt romantic lyricism. When the latter takes over, Molina can still hold the listener's attention with ballads that reveal a pronounced sensitivity, both human and artistic: such is the case with the excellent “Shenandoah” and “Map Of The Falling Sky”.

These, however, are just isolated moments, since across the rest of a record that is perhaps overly long, a dusty country-blues takes over, its electric trappings diluted by limpid melodies, unhurried rhythms, and embellished with flourishes of horns (the opener “O! Grace”) and old-fashioned-sounding organ (“Little Sad Eyes”). While the deep nostalgia of the title track (“don’t let the final word be the tears in your eyes”) stays true to a personal homage to roots music, as do the murkier atmospheres of “Knoxville Girl”, Josephine also contains a few episodes in which Molina gets carried away with mannered interpretations of an imagery — even before a sound — that is partly flattened into alt-country cliché (“Song For Willie”, “Whip-Poor-Will”).

Josephine confirms both Molina's recent tendency to don the garb of the "cowboy with a guitar" and the gradual smoothing of Magnolia Electric Co.'s early electric excesses in favor of a welcome, if occasional, return to settings in which his songwriting skill and refined interpretive empathy can express themselves more fully.

Shortly after the release of Josephine, the fruit of a new collaborative project saw the light of day, reviving the Ohio singer-songwriter's old inclination, shelved since the glory days of The Lioness and Ghost Tropic. This time Molina's artistic partner is Will Johnson (Centro-Matic, South San Gabriel), and the experiment, simply named and titled Molina And Johnson, originated from a chance meeting and ten days the two artists spent together in early 2008, writing and recording music in near-total isolation.

The fourteen soft ballads that resulted from the collaboration mark a fruitful balance between Molina's rediscovered penchant for spare, pained compositions and Johnson's skill in weaving softer, more layered melodies. In a similar vein, the two trade off on vocals throughout the record, coloring their measured bluesy inflections now with the mournful tones so congenial to Molina, now (and more often) with the lightness — no less melancholic for it — of the Texan artist. And although some tracks point unmistakably back to the mood and lyricism that have marked Molina's entire output (above all “Each Star Marks A Day” and the shadowy “For As Long As It Will Matter”), the slowed-down cadences and the musical and narrative fascinations — aimed at capturing images of a desolate, almost unreal America — more often fade into a kind of dreamy singer-songwriter isolationism rather than into the clattering nostalgia of Magnolia Electric Co. or predictable alt-country registers.

The writing methods and the setting chosen by the two artists for the recording undoubtedly helped accentuate its most essential, desert-like qualities — precisely those needed to better showcase Molina's talent and voice, for too long now overshadowed by the electric roar of his latest outings (including live ones) with the full band.

Jason Molina died during the night of March 16, 2013. According to Chunklet.com, the cause of death was prolonged alcohol abuse, a problem that had kept him away from the scene since 2009. Molina, who had no health insurance — essential in the United States to be treated at any hospital facility — had spent several years trying to get sober at specialized treatment centers, and was living in a rural recovery community in West Virginia.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite Sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google