Like Bill Murray, Demi Moore, and Pac-Man, Jason Molina has a thing about ghosts. In the singer-songwriter's lyric vocabulary, "ghost" ranks alongside "moon" and "blues" in the top three most-used nouns, and in 2000 he named an album recorded under his previous guise, Songs:Ohia, Ghost Tropic. But Molina's phantasm fetish goes beyond linguistics; often, when his songs, voice, and production are at their best, Molina even begins to sound like a ghost, a reasonable approximation of what folk music from beyond the grave would resemble.
Molina's recent incarnation as the frontman of the southern-fried Magnolia Electric Co. has moved him away from that obsession, as despite the frequent use of the word "ghost," spectral visitations don't usually come with slide-guitar solos. Since the retirement of the Songs:Ohia alias, Molina's records have become more and more crowded, a progression away from his sparse, vacant beginnings to a more full and collaborative sound. Let Me Go3, on the other hand, represents a visit back to those alone-in-the-studio early days, and in doing so restores the haunted to his house.
Or maybe I should say "haunted mansion." While most folk singers go automatically to a production style that screams intimate, aiming to sound like they're sitting right next to you on the couch playing their songs, Molina's solo work emphasizes space-- you might be in the same room, but he's on the other side of an empty great hall. Rather than whispering in your ear, his voice is all about projection, surrounding you on all sides with thousand-mile echo on "It's Easier Now" and "Some Things Never Try", proving again and again that meager instrumentation doesn't have to sound diminutive and cozy.
In their paradoxically rich emptiness, many of the songs on Let Me Go don't settle for simple guitar-and-singing either, with Molina adding touches of piano and wheezing pump organ to "It Costs You Nothing", and a tortoise-speed drum-machine murmur to the album's final three tracks. Meanwhile, analog hiss fills every available nook and cranny, with occasional creaks and studio clatter that will thoroughly freak out anyone who dares listen on headphones in an empty apartment. Dynamics aren't ignored either, as after eight tracks of post-storm hush Molina abruptly pulls out the electric guitar on the final song, tuned to an awful clanging tone and blurting out shockingly loud string-bending notes in between verses.
But any successful ghost knows that it's not just the medium that's important in a good haunting, it's also the message. Molina once again proves himself the master of the opening line, from the thick imagery of the very commencement of the album ("Behind these eyes/ A desert spirit/ Sea serpent heart/ Inside a sunken ship") to apocalyptic weather forecasts ("The dark outside the world/ I think it looks like rain") to eerie, desperate paranoia ("Something must've happened to both of us"). The two songs with repetitive titles (the title track and "Get Out Get Out Get Out") come off especially ghostly, the perseverance only strengthening their purpose as either urgent warnings or longings for release, which presumably are the priorities of most spectral beings.
So is Let Me Go the long-awaited return to world's end folk supremacy for Molina, a retreat from the Crazy Horse fantasy camp of Magnolia Electric Co.? Probably not, given that its release is timed almost simultaneous to another Magnolia record, and the fact that Molina continues to only rarely play shows without the protective layer of a full band. But for fans missing the pause-in-the-thunderstorm pregnant solitude of Songs:Ohia, Let Me Go will get you that fix you've been craving, a teasingly short half-hour reminder of his old persona. Impersonating the paranormal must be an exhausting task, but at least Molina is willing to give us a brief haunting for old time's sake.
