I was determined not to mention Neil Young in this review, as I've always felt there were more apt comparisons for Jason Molina's voice and instrumentation-- plugged and unplugged-- but dammit, where there was at least plausible deniability before, now he's announcing his Neil love loud and clear. The first splintered chords of opener "The Dark Don't Hide It" make it certain who Molina has on his mind-- at least on this one song. For what it's worth, he really Neils it-- ah, nails it-- and if he had enough of an allegiance to Young to stick with it for an entire album, What Comes After the Blues? might not have carried Molina's earnest, personal gravity, but it also wouldn't have been so maddeningly inconsistent.
See, Molina's still drifting down midwestern highways, still a hard man to love-- "goodbye's half the words he knows"-- breakin' hearts just as soon as he'd break a speed limit, but whether he's heading toward his nascent roots-rock future or retreating toward the ghostly isolation of his past sound is no longer as clear as it once was. From the subtly confused, subdued sound of much of the album, it may not even be clear to Molina himself. At its worst, compromise is the art of making sure all invested parties walk away unhappy, and this album reeks of such poor bargains; seeking a compromise between austerity and a fuller sound, Molina shoots for half-full but comes up with half-empty. It's just hollowed-out enough to come up empty-handed with fans his alt-country efforts may have converted, and still too rowdy to please admirers of his earlier, more somber work.
The staple elements of any successful Molina effort-- his fractured, plaintive drawl and his self-fearing ruminations on his ability to transcend the base instincts of human darkness-- are still the focus of the album, however, and in this respect, Molina maintains a fearful consistency. If anything, the fragile voice that made him the Midwest's premier blue-collar indie hero has strengthened as Molina turns in some of his most impassioned performances, particularly "Hammer Down".
Molina's continued reliance on metaphors of ghosts, the night, the moon, and the stars, and the creaky (and unrelenting) world-weariness that permeates his music could be seen by now as a lyrical crutch if not for the sense that this is less a man coasting on familiar imagery and more a man exorcising his demons the only way he knows how. "Sometimes I forget that I've always been sick/ And I don't have the will to keep fighting it," he sighs on "Hammer Down", but the resignation in his voice is far from final; after all, as he sings on "I Can Not Have Seen the Light", "It's a fair fight/ And the best that I have felt in a long time". He's got no choice but to relish it, either; ghosts that have endured this long aren't likely to go away anytime soon.
And so Molina shoulders his ever-present burden, only to be kneecapped by the instrumentation and, to a lesser extent, mild-mannered Jennie Benford (Jim & Jennie and the Pinetops). As with Magnolia's guest vocalists, Molina's particular brand of Americana never seems to fully mesh with outsiders, and although "The Night Shift Lullaby" is the most successful attempt yet, Benford's voice is too strong and uplifting to fit the tone of the album. Elsewhere, her frequent harmonizing is just one step in a string of odd backing decisions on Blues-- In the Aeroplane Over the Sea-esque trumpet in "Leave the City", organ and violins on "Hard to Love a Man".
The desire to embellish and expand Molina's sound is admirable, but in most cases the flourishes are so conspicuous that they seem awkward and superfluous. His roots-rock foundation gives ground to more diverse compositions, but they're never fully explored, and that conflict grounds much of What Comes After the Blues? The common thread between Molina's prior work, sparse acoustic or country rock, was simplicity-- simple enough to augment rather than distract from Molina's voice, because his voice alone contained all the conflict he would ever need.
