Yeah, I don’t expect this to be a 500 reply thread but it’s my birthday this week and this is my present to myself so please indulge me. I know there’s a few fans on here because Jason Molina has been requested for a HGATR several times so let’s see how this goes
This is an absolutely beautiful album which, without overstatement, has definitely helped me through some difficult times in my life.
I’ll type a longer response later this week, but for now I’m voting a 10 and I’ll just leave it with this comment. On this album, Jason Molina had an incredible skill to mix these deceptively simple chord arrangements (Ring the Bell is only two chords FFS) and sparse instrumentation with devastating, analytical, poetic lyrics. When he’s singing, I genuinely feel like he’s speaking to me, and the things he’s singing out (depression, mostly) are perfectly rendered.
On Ring the Bell, when he sings:
“Help does not
Just walk up to you
I could’ve told you that
I’m not an idiot”
That’s the perfect encapsulation of the album: honest, disarming, heartbreaking.
An absolute all timer for me. Probably my favourite Jason Molina record, though I change my mind on that regularly. It’s so sparse and ragged yet oddly focussed and it captures something starkly beautiful in rust belt America. It’s reductive to call it an album about depression but if it is then it’s probably the best album about depression ever recorded. And that’s a crowded field.
I wrote something about Ring the Bell on a long dormant blog that I’m gonna indulge myself and post here:
10/10 along with Magnolia Electric Co. The tone is just amazing. Sounds like you’re inches away from the guitar. Find with a lot of this kind of thing I prefer hearing it raw but the demos don’t sound anywhere near as good as the finished album.
Interesting to know, I’ve never heard any Molina outside of that album but have been meaning to
I love Magnolia apart from the track with the country singer. I grew up with my dad playing Garth Brooks in the car all the time and it just sends me right back to that.
