Jason Molina – Eight Gates
Secretly Canadian – 7 August 2020
London is home to a population of tens of thousands of ring-necked parakeets. These small, dapper parrots are either an invasive pest or an uplifting flash of colour in an otherwise monochrome city, depending on who you ask. Nobody knows exactly where they came from (they are native to India and Africa), but several stories have grown up to explain their presence, some of which have the distinct tang of the folk tale about them. Some believe they escaped from the set of The African Queen, which was filmed in Isleworth in 1951, while another theory asserts that they were released in Carnaby Street by an acid-addled Jimi Hendrix in the 1960s. While a more mundane truth – the first pairs fled a damaged aviary in the storms of 1987 – is far more likely, the birds are now ingrained in the mythic fabric of the city. They are colourful characters in London’s unique story.
In 2006, or possibly 2007, Jason Molina moved to London and became part of that story. By that time he was already the reluctant darling of the American lo-fi indie scene. He had already released a run of albums that looked set to become cult classics under the name Songs: Ohia, as well as a couple of excellent records under his own name, and was now recording as Magnolia Electric Co., channelling everything from fractured folk to burned-out blues-metal jams along the way.
The constant changing of names was part of the Molina mystique, but it was something that always seemed unplanned: a result of the self-destructive worldview and damaging alcoholism that would eventually claim his life in 2013 rather than a career move. How much his life overlapped with his songs will always be debated, but what isn’t in doubt is that those songs were always bleak, beautiful and brutally honest, and his persona definitely bled into his work.
The personal folklore may have given Molina some control – or some illusion of control – over his own life. When in London he apparently fed a flock of parakeets. Perhaps he was drawn to their strange and conflicting origin stories. Perhaps they inspired him to create more stories of his own stories. Like the one where he said he had been bitten by a rare spider in Italy and displayed enfeebling symptoms that were a mystery to medical science. This spider-bite story may well have been a fabrication, but if that were the case, what was its intended result? To deflect from another kind of slump, a self-inflicted one? Or to add to that complex personal myth?
What we do know is that, while in London, Molina wrote and recorded a small collection of songs. Most were unfinished or at least unpolished, but with Molina, that’s often part of the deal anyway. The nine tracks are finally released here under the title The Eight Gates (a reference to the seven gates of London’s old city wall) and represent the last solo recordings he made before his death. The album begins with birdsong (can you just make out the squawk of a parakeet in the background?) and a rich drone before Molina’s unmistakable voice – something like a baritone Neil Young – and minimal electric guitar place us firmly in the territory of dark and deconstructed country music he made his own. This first track, Whisper Away, never reaches any kind of chorus. You have to hunt the melody down, and when you find it, it seems both rewarding and somehow chilling. Even before you get on to the lyrics it sounds like the last lucid diary entry of a man on the verge of succumbing to his demons.
But of course, Molina made a career out of writing songs that exist on the edge of darkness and doing it better than anyone else. Shadow Answers The Wall, with its insistent drum beats, is feverish and insular, a song that scratches at the inside of your head. What is more surprising are the moments of uplift: the aforementioned birdsong that bookends many of these tracks, the lilting strum of The Mission’s End – a song of lulled defiance – and Thistle Blue which, though typically dark, has a hallucinatory clarity to it. These moments frame the darkness. They make it more real, more believable, and therefore more potent.
The unformed nature of these songs is played up by Molina as if he knew they would never get a ‘proper’ recording. The sweet fragment of She Says is introduced by some studio chatter: ‘The perfect take is just as long as the person singing is still alive’, he tells his sound engineer, perhaps with one eye on his own poor health. Old Worry unfolds over a soft hum, pockmarked by sad violins and cradled in home studio hiss, while Fire On The Rail begins with an incredibly powerful a cappella section before brooding, distant instrumentation takes over, carrying Molina’s apocalyptic imagery to nightmarish places.
But despite the lo-fi aesthetic, some of the musicianship on The Eight Gates is mesmerising. Be Told The Truth pits violin against electric guitar in perfect tension, before a haunted organ creeps in and steals the show. Closing track The Crossroads And The Emptiness is all about Molina’s impeccable timing as a guitarist and singer. He knew how to weight a song with such precision that even a ninety-second fragment has the soul of an epic about it.
Songs like these seemed to pour out of Molina, and it is tempting to see him as a kind of savant whose failures in the real world of interpersonal relationships and self-care were a kind of trade-off for his ability to write some of the most incredible and emotional songs of recent decades. But the truth is more complex than that. The power of Molina’s art has never been in doubt, and this The Eight Gates offers further evidence for his genius. But it also offers a small glimpse of the bare bones, the craft and hard work that lies behind the artistry and heartbreak. And for that reason, it is an important document as well as a beautiful one.
Pre-Order and Save the album here: https://jasonmolina.ffm.to/eight-gates
Photo Credit: Christopher Bennett