Though Fading Trails is more minor-key, and less allusive, than past Magnolia Electric Co. efforts-- there are fewer baseball references and cruel women-- it would a mistake to write this record off as the product of diminishing returns. The ghost-moons and wolf-Christs with which Jason Molina pays homage to the blues, again and again, are not lyrical crutches, but attempts to build through repetition. He's a romantic, conjuring up handfuls of dust and crescent moons, empty baseball diamonds, and lost horizons in the service of a vision of a world that doesn't quite exist, though we might all feel, at one time or another, as though we've glimpsed it.
On the first Magnolia Electric Co. album, Molina had his own heart split in two, and his response was the only one we could expect: "Half I'm going to use/ To pay this band/ Half I'm saving because I'm going to owe them." His stoic devotion to his own craft even over his own heart is, like it was and still is for Bob Dylan, both myth and more or less the truth. The only thing that matters to him, even above his own songs, is the freedom to play them, which is why Molina's project is intelligible only as an ongoing one. In recording sessions, he regularly tosses out whole records and writes new ones on the spot. His live sets are populated with songs he wrote as recently as that day. Those like myself who miss Songs: Ohia, because they prefer directness over guitar solos and vulnerability over big chords, can comfort themselves with the fact that in the continuum of Molina's music, everything is equally yesterday's news and, at the same time, the beginning of yet another song.
On Fading Trails, Molina leans on the blues because there's nothing else to lean on. "Maybe if I send back the blues/ Her broken heart/ She'll send back my mine," he wonders on "A Little at a Time", then asks, "You can't lose it all at once, can you really?" The blues hold his heart and his life ransom. "A Little", like opener "Don't Fade on Me", is minimal and twangy in the manner of Songs:Ohia's Didn't It Rain, on which cymbals kept time like rain and acoustic guitars were footsteps on dark, unlit and gravelly roads. And the electric flourishes of Magnolia Electric here feel more like weather than the oft-cited Neil Young or Warren Zevon, all ominous snarls and quick flashes of slide guitar. "Don't fade on me," he begs, but everyone besides his band always does.
So what's left? "Harmony onward, friend" is Fading Trails' one boast, nestled among "Lonesome Valley"'s organ plunks and slide flourishes. He's chosen solos and a backing band over touring and recording by himself, because being able to play every night, rain or shine, is the only redemption he believes in, and the more people, the more music.
But just because Molina's in man-at-the-brink, guitar-in-hand mode doesn't mean Fading Trails is a recast of What Comes After the Blues and the Hard to Love a Man EP. Nor does it account for the Songs:Ohia records, which in my book are consistently better front to back-- less because I liked the old arrangements more (which I did), but because he soft-pedaled and sold his lesser songs better. I'd say Fading Trails is the best Magnolia's done, unless you count the nominally Songs:Ohia-made Magnolia Electric Co., which I do, and which is still the best Molina product out.
Still, Fading Trails better synthesizes the old solo Molina with the post-Newport 65, as it were, Molina. There are more gems in gem form (some otherwise great Magnolia songs have turned out merely good, due to the way-long guitar breaks between practically every line)-- say, "Don't Fade on Me", "A Little at a Time", and "Steady Now"-- and less full-on, Zevon guitar bleat on the ostensible burners.
Best is how fully realized Molina's always meta-blues have become, how his whole mythology is finally looking in the mirror and acknowledging mutual dependence, if not real love. Molina, increasingly, is singing not at himself, the hard-to-love-man, but at the very Midwestern blues he's always been trying to create. "Nothing lives for nothing," sings Molina, and he is figuring out song-by-song what's opposite those voids
