MAGNOLIA ELECTRIC CO – Hard to love a man

(CD, Secretly Canadian)

I should have mentioned this band when their last full album came out, but I never got around to it. (Though I am sure, I mentioned them often enough in all places and even had their picture on the startes-page on here.) You know how it is, with all time filled with things to do and places to go and the heart filled with all kinds of emotions that also have to be dealt with. Jason Molina definitely knows about it. For somebody writing so gentle and emotional songs, he is definitely a sweater and hard worker when it comes to doing things. Rumour has it, songs for this Mini-Album were written while touring. This might explain why they sound so out of one can, very close to each other in sound and atmosphere. Anyway, a song as beautiful as the title track on here, I understand he wanted to get it out of his system. “It’s hard to love a man like you / goodbye is half the words he knew”. That rolls it up in a few dense words. That’s poetry in my way.

The four original songs on “Hard to love a man” all wallow in that emotional swampwater that has drawn out melodies and dragging beats, hardly ever going over the 10 mph-line, somewhere between gentleness and sorrow. It’s like Neil Young at Harvest rolled with Neil Diamond and then shoved over to Codeine for some dinghy nightclub shows covering nothing but Townes Van Zandt. Molina is not a pounder on the refrain or the easily memorable line, but his songs definitely have hooks, but those come with his singing inflections when changing from one chord to another or the way he changes notes differently in his voice than in the rhythm section.

It seems as if Molina has the vision of how he wants to sound with Magnolia Electric Co. laid down now to the last single note of the electric organ playing in the back. I hope this leaves him room for some experimentation and liberation of the concept in the albums to come. Judging from the number of solo albums he has released (about ten is my guess) it seems as if he is able to hold out for the long distance as well. Well, my hope comes from my preference of the more open and diverse approach of the last album “What comes after the blues” to the more “rock-ish” live album that was the debut of this band “Trial and Error”. (don’t mistake these with the Molina solo-project Songs: Ohia that had a record called “Magnolia Electric Co” as well. Oh, heck, do mistake them, it will be good for you.)

Surprise comes with the last song, a fabulous and quite true to the original coverversion of Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London”, that has the jangly beat perfectly down and really livens up the whole experience of the album. At first listening I was disappointed, because I thought that the best song on the record was a cover version, and that is something I am only used to from stupid punk bands. But it is not true, it was my mistake. The cover version is only the easiest song to memorize on here. A refrain like “everybody’s doing something wrong” (from “doing something wrong”) or the story within the heartbroken “31 seasons in the minor league” are harder to digest and live with. But this is were Molina really shines, in the long distance and slow pace. That doesn’t make the choice of cover version any worse, because even though it remains a somewhat odd choice still, it is also in other ways perfectly fitting and enjoyable. And it doesn’t leave you all miserable and depressed.