Exhibit A: "If I wanted to play to fucking assholes, I would have played in New York City."--Jason Molina, to Athens, GA patrons, August 2002
Note - Exhibit A: Mr. Molina followed The Sunshine Fix and Snowglobe that night, but was opening for a then very-uncelebrated Polyphonic Spree. He'd been invited for some kind of "showcase." He explained that he would deliver both worlds of Songs: Ohia-- the solo performer and the full band-- but made it clear that the crowd had to be good during the solo stuff in order to be rewarded with a full band show. Molina had a right to expect an attentive crowd, having been specially chosen for this non-tour-stop event. He began to heckle the room as it socialized throughout his set and drowned out his mopey, Pyramid-ish hero-and-guitar material. "Why did you ask me to come here?" "I'm not doing anything until you shut up." Etc.
He tailored his set to a semicircle of anemic boys and girls who tried to "feel it," honest, but Molina's fragmented, voyeuristic ballads can seem self-directed and standoffish. Just before the show devolved into a filibuster, Molina gave the good kids two full band songs (one of which was the majestically serious "Farewell Transmission", from what would be his final album as Songs: Ohia), and then told them that he'd planned to do more, but oh well, not now, you drove-all-night-to-see-me shitbonnets. One year later, opening for Enon, Molina would "rock out" the whole set, and remain humble-- affable, even-- as if he knew the squirmy throng lacked the patience to comprehend his one-man chariots of fire.
Exhibit B: The Velvet Underground's Moe Tucker, in the Half Japanese documentary The Band That Would Be King, twice bemoans how "sick" it is that fringe artists have no chance of "making a limited living" via their music because they are denied access to major means of publicity and distribution.
Note - Exhibit B: But, but, but Moe! Even in this freest of states, we can't just do what we want and sustain ourselves. Within the existing structures that bind this planet's inhabitants, we can't all go write poems and massage pianos and practice your patented doon-doon-doon-PUH on our skins. Who would build airports and overpasses and laundromats? Whose punk fancy would those endeavors fulfill? And perhaps fringe artists such as Jason Molina are too plucky and impulsive for mass consumption.
Molina obviously lives for the song itself and its power to baptize his (or his characters') demons. If he were market- or fiscal-survival-driven, why would he interrupt his thrilling evolution with this recorded-in-2001, stripped-down, "vinyl-only" throwback to least-beloved discography-cloggers such as Our Golden Ratio and The Ghost? Those aggrieved collections contain naught but solo murk. Why didn't Molina "return to basics" with some interesting noise-tracks and drums, as he did to liven up Protection Spells? And if he was going on sabbatical from Albini, to skulk back into Mike Mogis' arms, why not hang some atmospheric scraps on the songs' bones, as he did on the incomparably haunting and underrated Ghost Tropic?
Exhibit C: "Using images from the craft, scientists have determined the age of the universe, about 13.7 billion years, and discovered that a mysterious energy, called the dark force, is causing all of the objects in the universe to move apart at an accelerating rate. This force is still poorly understood." --Paul Recer, Associated Press, January 2004
Note - Exhibit C: From news item entitled "U.S. Allowing Hubble Telescope to Degrade". Try to connect these dots: Jason Molina allowed Songs: Ohia to degrade. Often, humans celebrate their "earthiness" by broadcasting their affinity for "red" mud. NASA is refocusing at the behest of an unelected defense-industry bitch. They are shifting their energies to the moon, a hunk of dead rock on which our country won a gladiatorial drag race/pissing contest with "red" Russia (resulting in the mass manufacture of Tang, Velcro and lubricants for machines as well as humans). Jason Molina has shifted his energies to utilities concerns, such as Magnolia Electric Company, but he frequently refers to the moon. Mars is the "red planet." Pyramid contains a cathedral-wrecking piano dirge entitled "Red Comet Dust". Interplanetary travel is as excruciatingly slow as this album. I think you can detect the conspiracy-dandruff here. When MolinaGate blows wide open, we will learn how he maintains such a grip on the dark cosmic force, while proclaiming, "I want to be true like the solid earth." (A death wish?)
Exhibit D: Since he busted onto the scene in 1995, Jason Molina has released an estimated 23 songs that are over seven minutes long.
Note - Exhibit D: "Jason Molina" is not a post-rock quintet, nor is he Bob Dylan, but this record's best songs are the monsters. "Long Desert Train" is the least adorned and most traditional, and its list of insecurities is harrowing. The title track is Mogis' showpiece, as Molina sounds like he's reluctantly gigging at a wedding chapel on a tin replica of Noah's ark. The song is about "our" adaptability to heinousness. (Molina loves these kinds of generalizations, things "we all" go through.) "You'll have friends who won't come home/ You'll see their bones not separate yet from death/ You'll get used to it." Need I mention the war on war? Need I mention that death is a character on most of this album's songs, an active participant with fireballs and a language? "Honey, Watch Your Ass" is one of the best Molina compositions ever, ever, and it convicts its neighbors of slightness. Despite a lyric that hands critics a hammer ("It's like nothing's got a pulse"), the song communicates its danger, passion and withdrawal vividly and urgently. The clunkiness of some of the other songs' lyrics, and the inevitability of their imagery must be embarrassed to run up against showstoppers such as, "She smells a little like a train."
Exhibit E: "In a world without sadness what would there be to encourage attachment to our children or our partners?" --Lewis Wolpert, Malignant Sadness: The Anatomy of Depression
Note - Exhibit E: The reviewer's mother spent one Christmas-- this woman loves Christmas-- in solitary confinement at a state prison. One of the reviewer's high-school girlfriends just got killed in Iraq. The reviewer's exercise bulimia has reached stage four (called "Omelet Equals Treadmill" by doctors). Sanatorium residence runs in his family. The poor reviewer, impervious to "real-world" pathos, regularly weeps along to albums, having disproportionately privileged their status as safely manipulative/triggering commodities. The reviewer takes Jason Molina too seriously, having collected all of his releases, as if they were buffers against some fundamental lack. But even the reviewer can find mirth and consolation, in a bawdy Britcom, or a backyard fight between a raccoon and a cat. Just as Elliott Smith's "Needle in the Hay" was perfect for the suicide-attempt scene in The Royal Tenenbaums, any song on this album would complement a still-photo montage of a prolonged labor ending in a miscarriage.
Exhibit F: "Don't believe the hype." --Public Enemy, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
Note - Exhibit F: Secretly Canadian's website explains that Molina camped out in the studio like Mary Shelley for this album, but the album's songs keep their distance from the listener. Molina feels everything, to an almost macho, almost Russell Crowe extreme. Secretly Canadian cites the vocals of Ali Farka Toure, but the reviewer only hears the guitars of Ry Cooder, or slowed-down soul/funk greats, in Molina's choral, and occasionally erect vibrato. Keeping this album would be like saving some shed space for a cool-looking but dead lawnmower. Pyramid Electric Co. is a thing of beauty and mystery, but its skin is chafed from wallowing, and I am its Debra Winger, slurping up mascara. If you "get" it, congratulations; you're impenetrable.
