Magnolia Electric Co. – What Comes After The Blues
It’s probably a rhetorical question, but that doesn’t mean there’s no answer. So then, what does come after the blues? Recriminations, if you’re Jason Molina.
Two years after releasing the final Songs: Ohia album, which was titled Magnolia Electric Co., Molina is now performing as Magnolia Electric Co. His first studio album under that name, recorded live in three days in Steve Albini’s Chicago studio, is a bracing collection of often reproachful songs loosely based on the Hank Williams classic “I Saw The Light”. Variations on the phrase recur throughout What Comes After The Blues, most memorably on the stark closing track, “I Can Not Have Seen The Light”.
The brutal introspection starts much earlier on the record, though. Molina lays bare a scorching cynicism on the propulsive opener, “The Dark Don’t Hide It”. Brooding strings swell underneath “Hard To Love A Man”, and Molina sounds devastated as he tells an absent father-like figure, “Goodbye was half the words you knew.” One presumes “hello” wasn’t the other half. His weariness is almost palpable on the shattering acoustic ballad “Hammer Down”, and he murmurs Hank’s refrain with the quiet fervor of someone who is pretty sure there are no rewards waiting in this life.