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Jason Molina ditches his Songs: Ohia brand name to hide behind a new pseudonym that’s also (somewhat confusingly) the title of his own last-but-one album...

What Comes After The Blues and Trials & Errors by Magnolia Electric Co.

With What Comes After the Blues, we enter a new era with Jason Molina. After seven full-length studio albums in as many years - each recorded using a revolving cast of players under the name Songs: Ohia - Molina has retired the old band name as well as his wayward days and settled in with a new and consistent cast of players. He has named this group Magnolia Electric Co., after his final Songs: Ohia album. Why now? Surely moving to Southern Indiana and finding a once-in-a-career band down in Bloomington in Pete Schreiner, Jason Groth, Mark Rice and Mike Kapinus has had something to do with it.

Sonically, this album isn't a huge departure from where Songs: Ohia was headed these past few years. The steel howling hauntedly, the guitars soaring and crunching with verve, and the songs still resonating with timelessness. Steve Albini's live-in-a-room and captured-as-it-was-played engineering technique is still a crucial player as well.

Trials & Errors

Where we find the marked difference with this new band and with these players in this new cloak are in their confidence as afforded by experience and trust in one another. These guys are talented, hard-working, and actually enjoy playing with one another - and you can hear it in the songs. As on the limited edition live album Trials & Errors the Magnolia Electric Co. know exactly what they are shooting for and hit it in the centre with every attempt. This is not indie rock anymore. Magnolia Electric Co. have made an album that is both rocking and full of life. It's a fist pumper and manages to hit great depths of beauty as well.

In the tradition of Bob Seger, Tom Petty, John Fogerty, Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen and Ronnie VanZant, Molina is revered as being very personal songwriter who is unafraid to be vulnerable in song. And, like those artists, in Magnolia Electric Co., he has his Silver Bullet Band, Heartbreakers, CCR, Crazy Horse, E-Street Band and Skynard to balance the personal nature of the work with rock & roll of just such a collaborative and sublime nature that it defies being pigeon-holed as folk. Perhaps best categorized as working class rock, Magnolia Electric Co. is the band Molina has been searching for his whole life.

Strangely enough, What Comes After The Blues is actually not the first album from the band. Their already hard-to-find debut was recorded live only a few months after they had formed. That recording: Trials & Errors captures Jason Molina's then very new band on one magical night in 2003 and finds them onstage, somewhere in Brussels in 2003. A scintillating audio document of one of America's most important contemporary live acts evolving into something really special and doing what it does best - whipping an audience into a frenzy.

Creedence Clearwater Revival

This set captures Molina & Co right after Molina had retired the Songs: Ohia machine in favour of this powerful new vision of his. Two years in the planning process, the new project took its name from the last Songs: Ohia full-length album. Composed of a nucleus of four members, this particular show captures the newly christened band on its first tour in its earliest state. Still a four-piece with Pete Schreiner providing the back beat drum pulse, Mike Kapinus on bass and melancholic trumpet, and the two Jason's duelling over guitar solo space: Molina's down-tuned guitar matching his now settled tenor voice, and Groth's Creedence-channelling rhythm guitar and solos filling out the upper register.

With Molina as the principal songwriter, the songs are as classic as his fans have come to expect over the course of seven Songs: Ohia full-lengths (all released between '96 and '03). With his new band, however, fans can finally enjoy a stable & more-than-able rhythm section that just gets tougher and tougher with each performance. Like a juggernaut that simply chews up everything in its path, on Trials & Errors, the new Magnolia grinds through three old Molina favourites (two from Songs: Ohia's Didn't It Rain and one from the Songs: Ohia album Magnolia Electric Co).

Fans may recognise that Trials & Errors comes peppered with a homage or two to Neil Young. One could, in fact, argue that the album is an existential response to Tonight's the Night. While from the songwriting perspective Molina is often pegged as the perennial downer, this is not, like Young's, a record born out of a series of sudden tragedies, but rather out of a whole life of growing up & out in the Midwest, surrounded by a small town mentality in a wide open space. It is an album about finally accepting one's place in this world; about standing ground and owning up to it with confidence.

Literary

These are familiar themes that run through some of the greatest literary works of our last great century. Join Magnolia Electric Co. as they play their part in a long-standing tradition of touring musical artists such as Lynyrd Skynyrd and Creedence Clearwater Revival that capture the spirit of their own homes, traditions and principles and communicate those through the chooglin' rock of ages on stage for rooms full of impassioned audiences 150+ nights a year. This is all about that wandering spirit, and the longing to wrangle it into place every now & again.

In subsequent tours, this core line-up would soon shift to find Mark Rice (from the Impossible Shapes, John Wilkes Booze) replace Schreiner on drums, with Schreiner (who's played with The Panoply Academy, Scout Niblett, The Coke Dares) moving to bass guitar, and Kapinus (Okkervil River sideman) shifting to keyboards/piano & trumpet while Groth (the Impossible Shapes, John Wilkes Booze, the Coke Dares) and Molina remain constant on guitar.

Beginning as a nice folk song with acoustic guitar intro, the Jennie Benford-penned The Night Shift Lullaby is met by Rice's steady drum beat and Mike Brenner's steel guitar. This howling steel guitar is the phantom that gives an otherworldly feel to the first half of What Comes After the Blues. We find no Molina vocals in the mix, but an outstanding lead vocal performance from Benford with the rest of the Magnolias backing her up, a testament to the fact that Magnolia is not purely a Molina vehicle, but a team effort.

Lonesome

A lonesome Molina guitar solo can be heard, however, calling out. He's come out of his shell as a guitar player a great deal, a product perhaps of his voice having matured over the years, mellowing into a sombre tenor. It's also surely because - in Groth and Brenner - he's found his perfect guitar foils. Indeed, guitars carry a much greater share of the lyrical weight on What Comes After the Blues, with the three's guitars often engaging in a dialogue in their own tongue.

The full track listing for What Comes After The Blues looks like this:

1. The Dark Don’t Hide It
2. The Night Shift Lullaby
3. Leave the City
4. Hard To Love A Man
5. Give Something Else Away Every Day
6. Northstar Blues
7. Hammer Down
8. I Can Not Have Seen The Light

For more information – plus a chance to hear two tracks from the above song list (The Dark Don’t Hide It and Leave the City) as well as two numbers from the hard to find live release – check out the Secretly Canadian website at: www.secretlycanadian.com

Perhaps the album's stand-out track is the aforementioned Leave The City, the ode Molina penned to his beloved former home of Chicago. On it, with a crying trumpet soaring at full-mast he sings: “Broke my heart to leave the city, I mean it broke what wasn't broken in there already, but all my great reasons for leaving, now I can't think of any. It's true, it was a hard time that I come through. It's made me thankful for the blues...”

What Comes After The Blues is out now, on CD and vinyl LP. Trials & Errors is also available on the same label – as a double vinyl set – but is tough to track down. The Jason Molina/Songs: Ohia album that inspired the new band name: Magnolia Electric Co. is also available – and well-worth hunting down, as a vinyl LP with free CD format included. All on the Secretly Canadian label.

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