It’s guilt or salvation, death or guidance. The subject is too broad for anything so specific. Backed by a steady rhythm and, for the first time, drums, the concrete images of the first two songs dissolve into a dreamlike web of solemn declarations and duplicitous threats, the nature of which remain unexplained.
Members of the band chant the song’s refrain with him as if they were summoning something back from the dead, and the strings oscillate like the wiper blades mentioned in the lyrics, drawn alternately between the twin poles of a visible and invisible reality.Ĭosmic hounds and serpent’s tongues populate the next song, “Ring the Bell,” which returns to the subject of helplessness and work. He fixes the song in Indiana, “on the bridge out of Hammond,” then moves on to images of the afterworld, ghostly lights, radio towers, diesel rigs, and the moon. It’s the swaying of their guitars that matters, their constant back and forth forming a ritualistic backdrop for the semi-magical tone of Molina’s geographic meditations. Here the band trades in gestures and physical substance more than in melody.
“Steve Albini’s Blues” translates that restlessness into the clockwork motion of a pendulum. Then, at the end, he struggles with the idea of companionship and help: “If you see me struggle all night and / Give me a hand cause I’m in need / I’ll call you friend indeed / But I’m going to watch my own back.” Jennie’s wordless voice comes to the fore here, and a restless feeling settles over the music. Jason sings about dark storms, watching your own back, and helping others. The words echo that tension and introduce one of the album’s central themes, which is developed over the rest of the album in diverging ways. At times, Molina’s voice seems to be the only thing in the room, every one of his phrases swinging over the edge of nothing. The spaces between the notes and the black quiet that laps against each strummed chord play as large a role in setting the mood as the words to the song, and the sparse accompaniment emphasizes what isn’t present as much as it calls attention to itself. Besides Jason, only Jennie Benford’s voice and a mandolin show up for “Didn’t It Rain.” The rest depends on Molina’s commanding voice and his lyrics, which swim in an ambiguous play of shadow and light. Given the opportunity to play anything at all, this Songs: Ohia band opts to flirt with the edge of silence on the opening cut. Some of that heaviness comes by way of suggestion. It’s a strategy Molina had used for past records, but it had never yielded anything as cogent and heavy as Didn’t It Rain. Mistakes would be made and overdubs were not an option, so the idea was to keep playing and to capture the performance raw. Surrounded by posters of blues musicians from Chicago that Molina had brought with him, they were all asked to play in the same room together and to invent their parts as they went along.
The only two people at Soundgun who had recorded with Jason before were producer Edan Cohen, who, in 2001,manned the boards for Jason’s cover of Boz Scaggs’s “Sweet Release” and Jennie Benford, who that same year sang backup on the Cohen-produced 7” version of “Lioness.” Everyone else came to the game a rookie. So it’s no surprise that, for Didn’t It Rain, he traveled to Soundgun Studio in Philadelphia to play with eight musicians he barely knew. But Molina never stuck with one group for very long, on the road or in the studio, and he wouldn’t until after 2004’s Magnolia Electric Co. Songs: Ohia - Didn’t It Rain (Deluxe Edition) (Secretly Canadian)ĭidn’t It Rain is the sixth and final Songs: Ohia studio album, the enigmatic zenith of a seven-year run that saw Jason Molina record with no fewer than seven different bands.
0 kommentar(er)
