Names don't seem to be terribly important to Jason Molina. He began recording under various guises during the mid-1990s and released his first album as Songs: Ohia in 1997. Earlier this decade, he unceremoniously changed the band's name to the Magnolia Electric Company (such that Songs: Ohia's final album, called The Magnolia Electric Company, is often filed under both S and M). Recently, whether by choice or by common usage, both the The and the mpany have been dropped, leaving only Magnolia Electric Co. It's not as drastic as the moniker-shifting of Will Oldham, but it is interesting considering that Molina (who also releases under his own name) is the sole long-term member of Magnolia Electric Co.
That most recent incarnation of the name appears on every piece of the Sojourner box set-- the wooden container, the five discs, their popcorn-bag-style sleeves, the postcard tracklists, even the pewter medallion. Only the fold-out map of the stars carries no insignia, which seems vaguely appropriate. This branding implies a more rooted identity, but Molina apparently knows that names changes as easily and as quickly as the scenery, and one assumes that for him it's never the same from one day to the next. It's difficult to tell whether his nomadic lifestyle (he tours nearly constantly) is the impetus behind his music, which obsesses over displacement through lunar and celestial imagery, as if he's constantly navigating by the stars. Or perhaps it's the other way around: Maybe his musical fascinations demand displacement and rootlessness. Like Isaac Brock in the 1990s, Molina is concerned with constant motion through an American landscape. His albums, and especially Sojourner, are postmillennial road-trip art-rock, albeit in a very traditionalist, rather than an existential, vein.
Molina's view of the country has more in common with Dust Bowl itinerants or even nineteenth-century landscape painters than with most current touring acts. Sojourner is his largest canvas yet, and perhaps his most detailed and deliberate. The 4xCD/1xDVD set culls tracks from the four recording sessions that fed his 2006 album, Fading Trails, and yet, these generous odds and ends make for a better listening experience than the release for which they were intended. Perhaps it's the length: Molina's musings sound like products of long drives spent looking at barren scenery, and it often seems like that's how they're best consumed and considered. Sojourner will get you pretty far.
So let's start in Memphis: Sun Sessions is the shortest disc in the set, with only four patiently paced songs forming a solid EP. With its full sound that plays into the local mood without trying to re-create Bluff City sounds, "Talk to Me Devil, Again" goes down to the crossroads, but "Hold on Magnolia" and the traditional "Trouble in Mind" extol the virtues of strength, perseverance, and hard-won hope-- the last a rarity for Molina. "I won't be blue always," he sings on "Trouble in Mind", finding solace in the century-old words. "You know the sun is going to shine in my backdoor someday."
Not everything is so rosy: "Everything in its place," Molina sings on "Steady Now", the opening track on Shohola. "The world does have to end in pain." Featuring Molina accompanied only by his guitar and the roomy hiss of the recorder, Shohola is lonely and quiet like his 2006 vinyl-only album Let Me Go Let Me Go Let Me Go, although never quite as intense. It's a perfect setting for his off-kilter vocals, which are often compared to Neil Young despite not sounding very much like that grizzled Canadian. On "Spanish Moon Fall and Rise" and "The Lamb's Song" he sounds just barely on key, with a steeliness in his voice that is often mistaken for detachment. But here even his breaths are audible as he tentatively picks his way through "Night Country" and "Shiloh Temple Bell", as if driving down some dark road.
Nashville Moon and The Black Ram both return Molina to a full-band setting. The former, produced by Steve Albini, emphasizes his classic-rock chops on "Lonesome Valley" and "Texas 71", allowing for jammy passages, short guitar solos, and underlinable declarations like "I make my mistakes on my own time." The band is especially solid, most notably Mark Rice's drums and Mike "Slo-Mo" Brenner's stately pedal and lap steel, but there's an almost self-consciously workmanlike spirit to these dozen road hymns, as if Albini is highlighting a blue-collar ethos in Molina's words. The straightforward arrangements on "Hammer Down" and "Don't Fade on Me" strengthen their impact, however, and the clear, clean melodic lines tie all the songs together, almost too neatly.
Black Ram is something weirder altogether, and the most satisfying disc in the set. David Lowery's production highlights the odd and the atmospheric in Molina's music, creating a weary travelogue that strives to pinpoint the epic in the everyday. The title track clamors dramatically, the guitars on "What's Broken Becomes Better" churn tensely, and "Will-O-the-Wisp" sounds like a Morricone soundtrack for some unfilmed Western. It's a long drive for someone with too much to think about.
The DVD, titled The Road Becomes What You Leave, wraps all these disparate approaches together as Molina and his road band travel through cold, rural Canada and play a few of these compositions. But it only points out how different these four discs are and how multifaceted and expandable Molina's seemingly limited artistry can be. Spanning multiple styles and states as it maps out both a personal and a national landscape, the set is perhaps accidentally one of the strongest releases of his career, despite its catch-all organization. Molina still sounds rootless and displaced, but Sojourner triangulates a place that's as close to home as he ever seems to get.
