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Songs: Ohia: The Magnolia Electric Co. [1]

['Condé Nast', 'Jason Heller']

Date: 2023-08

The late Jason Molina began his career by enduring constant comparisons to Will Oldham. The analogy became a lazy one, but its basis is understandable. Molina’s debut single under his Songs: Ohia moniker, 1996’s “Nor Cease Thou Never Now”, was released on Oldham’s own Palace Records, and his quivering, sing-speak cadence bears an unmistakable resemblance to Oldham’s. That association endured—up to and including a 2002 collaboration between Molina and Oldham (plus Appendix Out’s Alasdair Roberts) called Amalgamated Sons of Rest. But there are two other singing-songwriting contemporaries of Molina that make for equally apt comparisons: Ryan Adams and Elliott Smith. Adams’s Gold came out in 2001, and its unabashed ode to heartland-fueled classic rock emboldened a generation of punk-and-indie shitkickers to embrace their FM-radio roots. Smith had turned increasingly away from indie rock and toward a more organic classic-pop sound in the late 90s and early 00s—that is, until his suicide in 2003 cut that evolution short.

That year also marked the release of Molina’s best and most pivotal album: The Magnolia Electric Co., which showcased his own strong shift toward rock populism. Imbued with a dust-under-the-fingernails weariness, the album is so representative of Molina’s sound and spirit, he subsequently took Magnolia Electric Co. as his new band’s name. Molina’s work on Magnolia wasn’t as cryptically oblique as Oldham, as stadium-sized as Adams, or as harmonically polished as Smith. It was, perhaps for the first time in his recording tenure, pure and full Molina. But the album installed itself into the American songwriter landscape circa '03 in a way that closed the circuit among his peers and secretly, quietly willed a pocket of the zeitgeist into being.

The 10th anniversary of The Magnolia Electric Co. is upon us, hence the obligatory 10th-anniversary reissue. The album would have called for the deluxe retrospective treatment even if Molina hadn’t died earlier this year, of organ failure related to his long struggle with alcohol. The respectful euphemisms have flown. The bottom line, however, is harsh: Molina drank himself to death. But Magnolia is not a drunk record, nor is it a drinking record. While legions of alt-country troubadours have drained the tear-in-my-beer song of much of its traditionalist proof, Magnolia is sharp, clear-eyed, and savagely focused.

Beginning the album with “Farewell Transmission” is more than an act of perversity. Molina lays out his blueprint not just for the rest of Magnolia Electric Co. the album*,* but for the rest of Magnolia Electric Co. the band. What once was jittery and hesitant in his delivery is now howlingly powerful; gone is Songs: Ohia’s push-and-pull between intimacy and stridency. In its place is red-blood, full-throated, post-hippie country rock, right down to a name that evokes both Quicksilver Messenger Service and the Grateful Dead’s “Sugar Magnolia”. Only this is Cosmic American Music scorched by the heat of reentry, space-cowboy romance for the year of the Columbia shuttle disaster. “Must be a big star about to fall,” Molina rasps in awestruck wonder over amber waves of twang and pedal-steel majesty. The sweetheart of the rodeo now works at a truck stop somewhere on Route 66, handing out the men’s room key and smiling crookedly to hide her missing teeth.

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[1] Url: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18704-songs-ohia-the-magnolia-electric-co/

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