Jason Molina used to wail. In a review of the Songs: Ohia album that gave Molina's Magnolia Electric Co. it's name, Eric Carr chastised a guest singer with, "[H]e's not Molina, whose voice you paid to hear." Another Forker, William Bowers, once referred to Molina's voice as an "occasionally erect vibrato." Like chalking a pool cue, Molina's distinctive bleat was a hedge against flaws, and even his best, most interesting albums feature many. You know where this is going. That final Songs: Ohia marked not just a stylistic shift for Molina, from doom-folker to classic rocker, but a vocal one as well: The man fell in love with his croon, an even, spread-able tenor, and one that has smoothed the edges of Molina's full-band works with Magnolia Electric Co.
Billed as a comparatively sparse counterpoint to Magnolia's recent classic-rock material, Josephine offered real stimulus for change: a three-year studio-album hiatus, the longest of his career; a move to London for a famous Midwesterner; one more turn with frequent engineer Steve Albini; the December 2007 passing of touring bassist Evan Farrell.
But no. Look no further than "Whip-poor-will", which, if you're keeping score at home (Molina's fondness for baseball and for numbers suggests he hopes you are), was the finest of a fine set of outtakes for the aforementioned Magnolia Electric Co. album. Molina's vocals, aided by slight pedal-steel, smooth over one of his finest lyrics to the point of inscrutability. "Shiloh", from 2007's Sojourner box set, also receives a new treatment, this one an improvement, but the rehashing is a curious decision for an artist who claims to have recorded six albums since Sojourner. More distressing is that "Shiloh" and "Whip-poor-will" stand as the best, most resplendent songs on Josephine, the latter's strong-willed confession and subsequent plea to heaven putting to shame Molina's unspecific ramblings about horizons and "when the fire didn't answer to the flame" elsewhere.
Molina has cautioned us from reading Josephine as an epitaph for Farrell, and it's just as well: Separating mourning from Molina's usual wistfulness is like trying to parse black and beige grains of sand. The one change Josephine offers is trading Fading Trails' penchant for bombastic guitar for a more varied set of arrangements. "Little Sad Eyes" marries Molina's early-years amelodicism to a peppery Hammond organ. Too-short closer "An Arrow in the Gale" invites, finally, Molina's bandmates onto a chorus, and they implore the title character (don't go searching hard for a narrative) to "run run run." "The Rock of Ages" is awkward and a bit hard to take, but it's Molina's first real stab at incorporating 1950s vocal-pop into his songwriting, that era's fascination with teenage tragedy and heartbreak a natural fit for Molina's mythmaking.
So the croon remains, but please don't read this as a love letter to an artist's younger, now-gone days. Josephine is the first Molina album to suggest that he's learned anything more than bombast from those classic rock albums he's been accused of aping. There are real, new stylistic portents here. But Josephine mostly suggests new directions rather than moving in them, and the traceless ache of its muddy middle-third ("Hope Dies Last", "The Handing Down", "Map of the Falling Sky") is burdensome. So we wait, still, but judging by those six albums on the docket, we won't wait long.
