Plumbiferous Media

Jason Molina, lead singer of down-tempo, occa­sion­ally lo-fi indie-folk band Mag­no­lia Elec­tric Co. has teamed up with Centro-matic lead Will John­son to cre­ate a full-length col­lab­o­ra­tion. Both musi­cians bring sig­nif­i­cant musi­cal­ity, expe­ri­ence, and tech­ni­cal pro­fi­ciency, and it is easy to imag­ine the two work­ing together quite well. But while the two would seem a promis­ing com­bi­na­tion, unfor­tu­nately, the album is about as cre­ative as its name, Molina and Johnson.

The instru­men­tals on Molina and John­son are, for the most part, noth­ing short of for­get­table. The very, very sim­ple instru­men­tal parts occa­sion­ally become decently inter­est­ing, such as on “Don’t Take My Night from Me,” where the gui­tar com­pletely changes the tone of the album, or with the fit­tingly mean­der­ing key­board part of “For as Long as It Will Mat­ter.” How­ever, for the most part, the instru­men­tal lines remain noth­ing more than a series of rel­a­tively uncre­ative chords, occa­sional mim­icry of used melodic strains, and quiet sub­servience under the vocals. The mag­ni­tude of this effect is great enough that it is rel­a­tively clear that if some sem­blance of instru­men­tals were not required for this spe­cific genre of music, the album would have none.

Equally bor­ing is the gen­eral lack of struc­tural diver­sity between tracks. Those that do not fol­low the pat­tern of instru­men­tals accom­pa­ny­ing voice, alter­nat­ing with purely instru­men­tal sec­tions that attempt to make up for the lack of vocals will, say, sim­ply replace the sec­ond sec­tion with instru­men­tals accom­pa­ny­ing a sec­ond voice, as is the case on “All Gone, All Gone.” “All Gone, All Gone” also hap­pens to be one of the more exper­i­men­tal tracks on the album, as is indi­cated by an incred­i­bly irri­tat­ing effect used through the track that can be best imi­tated by play­ing lightly with one’s head­phone or speaker con­nec­tions. Over­all, Molina and John­son has very lit­tle to offer musically.

Molina and John­son begins well with “Twenty Cycles to the Ground,” led by Will Johnson’s plain­tive voice, com­ple­mented by Jason Molina’s rich, country-twanged vocals. The album alter­nates between such coop­er­a­tion and tracks led by one of the two. John­son and Molina are well matched - their vocal har­mony on tracks such as “Twenty Cycles” works very well. How­ever, regret­table and occa­sion­ally irri­tat­ing vocal effects and affec­ta­tions on many tracks leave the vocals much less com­pelling than they could have been. Addi­tion­ally, cer­tain vocal sec­tions seem slightly over-stretched or per­haps over-enunciated, and occa­sion­ally (as with Molina’s last album with his main project, Mag­no­lia Elec­tric Co.) indi­vid­ual tracks lack vocal vari­a­tion within them­selves. While there are some laud­able vocal sec­tions of Molina and John­son (mostly the open­ing por­tion of “Twenty Cycles”), most of the album leaves some­thing to be desired.

Molina and John­son is com­posed of the same vivid imagery so elo­quently con­structed in the music both of Molina’s Mag­no­lia Elec­tric Co. and Johnson’s Centro-matic. The down­tempo aes­thetic of the album is com­bined with lyrics which range between rem­i­nis­cent and melan­choly, unsur­pris­ing from Molina and John­son, both of whom have had much expe­ri­ence with such themes thanks to their ties to folk and indie music. For­tu­nately, Molina and John­son man­age to avoid cliché, instead writ­ing gen­er­ally thought-provoking lyrics. As John­son sings of the “Shep­herd girl of the after­world” on “34 Blues,” it’s dif­fi­cult not to feel at least a lit­tle of the almost des­o­late imagery he’s cre­at­ing. At the same time, how­ever, a lack­ing instru­men­tal back­drop pre­vents the lyrics from being truly heard, and so what is per­haps the best part of the album is pushed too far back.

Molina and John­son could have been a good exam­ple of the pos­si­bil­ity of col­lab­o­ra­tions between estab­lished musi­cians. How­ever, a num­ber of sig­nif­i­cant flaws pre­vents it from being any­thing more than mediocre. Vocal mis­steps and instru­men­tal banal­ity plague the album, and intrigu­ing lyrics are pushed nearly out of sight by a gen­eral lack of vari­a­tion. Molina and John­son has its strong points, but they’re not easy to find among the issues. At the end, Molina and John­son can’t quite stand up to the solo work of either Molina or John­son - a clear dis­ap­point­ment from two tal­ented artists.

This post is tagged 30-39, Molina and Johnson