Josephine
*Josephine* is Jason Molina’s closest alt-country album to date. The frontman for Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Co. has always flirted with the outer reaches of the genre, singing in a lonesome twang and finding the music’s lonely core in sweeping pedal steel and Neil Young-influenced bucking electric guitars, but with *Josephine* he comes ever closer to the music’s conventions. No longer settling on isolating two-chord dirges, Molina opens up new vistas that are clearly aimed westward. “The Handing Down” powers itself with a solid immovable organ, but “Shenandoah,” “Whip-poor-will” and “Hope Dies Last” feature the sort of forlorn Jack Kerouac-inspired night tripping that can be best explained as the sound of a man obsessed with the melancholic beauty at the heart of Hank Williams and Neil Young at their most stressed and haunted. The beats are tribal and final. The chords for “Map of the Falling Sky” come crashing with a doom that’s reflected in the fact that Molina lost a band member in a house fire and it’s to his ghost that this album is clearly illuminated.
Billed as a comparatively sparse counterpoint to Magnolia's recent classic-rock material, Josephine is the first Jason Molina album in three years.
Even if Jason Molina of Magnolia Electric Co. didn’t write songs about loss and loneliness, his pained, hollowed-out voice would still convey those subjects with unsettling intensity. The sympathetic accompaniment of his expansive band—which abandons its on-stage Crazy Horse roar to operate in a spare, desolate gray…
Molina claims to have written six albums in the last three years, all of them waiting for release. Providing he keeps the quality to the standard of the first half of this album, he’s going to remain a very hard man to ignore.
Jason Molina, the man behind Magnolia Electric Co. and Songs: Ohia, is never going to release an upbeat pop album, full of chart-friendly riffs and drum loops, but a few changes
As good as Molina is at working with gloom, Josephine is thankfully not a one-note slog through the valley of the shadow of death.
The humble beginnings of Josephine came about when Jason Molina and bassist Evan Farrell got together to work on some new song ideas.