Songs:Ohia, the project of singer-songwriter Jason Molina, an Ohio native who
made
a career out of imitating the Palace Brothers:
a quasi-yodeling falsetto, bitter lyrics of heartache,
lonely acoustic guitar, spare pseudo-country arrangements, stark melodrama.
The EP One Pronunciation Of Glory (Secretly Canadian, 1997), an
intellectual concept dedicated to historical figures, was a prelude to
the suicidal dirges and stately odes of
Songs:Ohia (Secretly Canadian, 1997).
Typical of the mood of the album are the
solemn rumination of Cabwaylingo (later renamed Vanquisher)
and the anemic lament of U.M.W. Pension.
The funereal Crab Orchard recalls early lugubrious Neil Young
and the catatonic Big Sewell Mt recalls an even more sedated Tim Buckley.
The folk litany
Gauley Bridge borrows
the tone of ancient bards.
Lyrically, Tenskwatawa stands out, a moving tribute to the legendary "prophet" of the Shawnee tribe.
The bluesy Blue Jay adds a moody saxophone but the songs are
sparsely (or not at all) arranged.
Alas, Molina is not exactly a popsmith and the melodies tend to sound all the same.
The obsessively mournful tone of Impala (Happy Go Lucky, 1998)
makes it difficult to discern the music from the mood.
The organ-driven An Ace Unable To Change (one of his signature songs) is almost a tragic lied in the vein of Nico.
The Rules Of Absence evokes a more spectral Neil Young and Just What Can Last feels like it is sung while dying in the vein of Nick Drake.
There are attempts to avoid sounding monotonous, like the
almost deranged lament Hearts Newly Arrived.
By his standards, Easts Heart Divided is both rocking and catchy.
This Time Anything Finite At All, with
a syncopated beat and a jazzy organ, doesn't even seem to belong to this album.
Backed by an ensemble comprising Edith Frost, violinist Julie Liu of Rex, Boxhead Ensemble's Michael Krassner and Joe Ferguson of Pinetop Seven,
Axxess & Ace (Secretly Canadian, 1999) shows a maturing artist, one
who can alternate the eight-minute swinging and soulful Captain Badass
to the plaintive
piano and violin ballad Come Back To Your Man,
while retaining his trademark
skeletal style in Love Leaves Its Abusers
and drifting as usual in derelict laments like Redhead;
one who
adopts a more intriguing voice in Hot Black Silk, somewhere between a vibrant soul shouter and Tim Buckley,
and in the rollicking How To Be A Perfect Man.
The seven-minute closer Goodnight Lover shows how far he has pushed
his songs for voice and guitar only.
It was his most accessible and professionally produced album yet.
Slightly less creative,
The Lioness (Secretly Canadian, 2000)
nonetheless continued his evolution towards a more original sound.
Alas, it is also a most
melancholy cry of a tortured soul: not so much music as brooding.
Backed by his Scottish friends Aidan Moffat and David Gow of
Arab Strap, and
Ali Roberts of Appendix Out,
Molina delves into a set of dark psalms.
What he gains in depth, he gives up in creativity, thereby forgetting that
art is the balance between the two.
The seven-minute melodrama The Black Crow is the tour de force.
The organ-driven Tigress boasts an anthemic melody, while
Nervous Bride
opts for a streamlined folk-pop sound.
The best touch is perhaps the
suspenseful church-like organ in Being in Love, which makes it sound like a funeral march.
Lioness is an odd serenade with Neil Young overtones.
The Ghost (1999) and
Protection Spells (2000) were recorded on tour and suffer from lo-fi production. Raw and improvised, they are mostly focused on Molina's stories, with little or no accompaniment other than shy guitar chords.
Ghost Tropic (Secrety Canadian, 2000) continued the exploration of a
creative sound and used it to deploy a surreal view of the world.
Molina's altered state of melancholy is painted by mysterious songs like
Lightning Risked It (for Japanese-paced plucked guitar and psychedelic chords) and No Limits On The Words (with even more elusive guitar strumming), which experiment with different guitarscapes.
The slocore elegy The Ocean's Nerves and the sinister threnody of The Body Burned Away, dressed with a bit of drumming and tinkling bells,
further disorient.
Molina descends into a spiraling hell of catatonic meditations.
The 12-minute Not Just A Ghost's Heart sends waves of
ghostly electronic pulsations against sparse tragic piano notes,
creating an even more otherworldly atmosphere.
Superficially, not much has changed from the previous albums: the spare,
minimal, anemic tunes roll but don't rock and eventually die of prostration.
However, here Molina leans towards the haunted and the metaphysical,
culminating with the closing 12-minute Incantations that seals
this monolithic requiem with floating electronic drones.
And the hallucinated instrumental that precedes it, Ghost Tropic, a collage of bird songs over gentle piano and xylophone, could be the real key to understanding this most cryptic work.
The whole album is shrouded in enigmatic guitar patterns and mortuary rhythms.
Touring member Dan Sullivan has released two instrumental albums under the
moniker Nad Navillus: Nad Navillus (Proshop, 1999) and
Show Your Face (Jagjaguwar, 2001).
Mi Sei Apparso Come un Fantasma (Paper Cup, 2001) documents a live performance.
The seven lengthy ballads of Didn't It Rain (Secretly Canadian, 2002),
mostly recorded live in the studio,
are finely-crafted like jewelry. Molina adopts the form of classic soul music to shape
his musical matter, keeping a cold, calm, surgical, almost gothic stand, as
he wraps that form around his tenuous meditations.
The album opens with two mournful acoustic wails that he croons like they are his last breaths:
Didn't It Rain (not far form the old yodeling style of country music)
and Steve Albini's Blues (akin to a plantation chant).
Combined with the mystical Cross the Road Molina, these songs bestow
a spiritual grandeur on the album.
Then he intones a slightly jangling folk-rock tune, Ring The Bell,
and embarks in the eight-minute Blue Factory Flame, a nocturnal and
slightly jazzy dirge with female backing vocals.
The lyrical peak is Blue Chicago Moon, a carefully distilled dose of
sadness.
Amalgamated Sons of Rest (Galaxia, 2002) was a collaboration among Will Oldham, Jason Molina of Songs:Ohia and Alasdair Roberts of Appendix Out.
Molina, flanked by a roots-rock ensemble, embraced a fuller band sound on
The Magnolia Electric Company (Secretly Canadian, 2003) with mixed results.
The seven-minute Farewell Transmission plods along in a rather dull manner.
The lengthy complex ballads hark back to blue-collar rock and southern boogie of the 1970s (John Henry Split My Heart), to Neil Young (I've Been Riding with the Ghost) and to
Nashville (the country-pop ditty Just Be Simple, the
waltzing litany The Old Black Hen),
but , alas, without
adequate songwriting.
Peoria Lunch Box Blues (sung by a female singer)
and the eight-minute laid-back shuffle Hold on Magnolia,
contain the blueprint for a good song but fail to accomplish what they set out
to.
Jason Molina's solo album
Pyramid Electric Co (Secretly Canadian, 2004)
is the companion release to Magnolia Electric Co: starker, more
melancholy, introverted. It sounds like the soundtrack of a solitary calvary.
Magnolia Electric Co's
Trials & Errors (Secretly Canadian, 2005), a live album from 2003,
signaled the birth of a new project.
The first studio album of Magnolia Electric Co,
What Comes After The Blues (Secretly Canadian, 2005),
was his most lively ever, and relatively catchy too
(The Dark Don't Hide It, Jennie Bedford's The Night Shift Lullaby),
while still somber when needed (Leave The City).
Unfortunately, the result is the 200th bad imitation of Neil Young.
Molina's musical life had basically undergone a personality split: on one side
Magnolia Electric Co, the public "band" project, and on the other one Jason
Molina solo, the private "folksinger" project.
Magnolia Electric Co's EP Hard To Love A Man (Secretly Canadian, 2005)
added four new Molina originals (especially
Doing Something Wrong) to the canon.
The subsequent album Fading Trails (2006) does not significantly upgrade
the science of introversion that Molina has been perfecting ever since.
Alas, the insistence on sounding like Neil Young makes sense only when he
can actually match the master's skills, which doesn't happen often enough
(Don't Fade On Me). The album is a hodgepodge of styles, recorded
in four different sessions.
Jason Molina's second "solo" album, the mostly acoustic
Let Me Go Let Me Go Let Me Go (Secretly Canadian, 2006),
fared better than the Magnolia Electric Co's albums because it did not
try too hard to create a soundscape. Thus it did create one, and a very
personal one, as opposed to just imitating Neil Young.
Let Me Go Let Me Go, I Cost You Nothing, Get Out Get Out Get Out would rank among Songs:Ohia's most ghostly tales.
The 4-cd box-set
Sojourner (Secretly Canadian, 2007), also credited to
Magnolia Electric Co, collected all sorts of unreleased recordings, most
of which deserved to be released, although none of them sounds truly essential.
The main treats are on the solo Shohola and the
band effort Black Ram, while Nashville Moon mostly rehashes old
(and not memorable) songs.
Magnolia Electric Co's
Josephine (Secretly Canadian, 2009), a requiem for a dead friend,
contains Josephine, Little Sad Eyes and Knoxville Girl.
Molina And Johnson (2009) was a collaboration with Centro-matic's Will Johnson.
Eight Gates (2020) was released posthumous and unfinished.
While terminally ill, he released the
eight-song EP Autumn Bird Songs (2012).
Molina died in 2013.
