May

11

Song in Plaster: Magnolia Electric Co, In the Human World

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Magnolia Electric Co’s “In the Human World” engages by evoking, its sounds recalling that peculiar American combination of open spaces and rust-streaked, decrepit industrial ruins, its lyrics stirring and opaque:

Mountains of the dead are you listening? You’re gonna lose a lot , now that the lightning has passed you by. You’ve already lost so much, now that the moon has passed you by. All the good things are asleep in the human world. It makes more room for the dark to walk around. Speak to all my friends whose names I can’t remember now: my heart is sick and I didn’t make it out. This time I’m leaving nothing, nothing behind.

Magnolia’s bandleader Jason Molina comes from the Rust Belt of northeastern Ohio, and over the course of several magnificent records under the name Songs:Ohia–especially Ghost Tropic, Didn’t It Rain, and Magnolia Electric Co.–his songwriting struck a balance between the concrete and  impressionistic that few have honed to such a degree. Precise details and images from the industrially devastated upper Midwest populate his songs, but they’re held in blurry focus and lit by cracks of lightning and the moon in various phases of menace; sonically, he sets his words to music that pushes at the outer limits of what folk rock and country and bar-band blues can tolerate and still remain recognizable as such.

We’ve called this feature Songs in Plaster; when you see those words in the title of a post, you ought to expect a sideways explanation of what a song is about or what it does, something abstracted from what the song is. In the Human World is already abstract and sideways, and in taking an oblique view of it one has to start writing like a music critic. My apologies. Forget these words, get this song, and find a country highway and drive down it at night, the headlights piercing and then being swallowed by the darkness.

Magnolia Electric Co: In The Human World (from the Sojourner box set)

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Comments

One Response to “Song in Plaster: Magnolia Electric Co, In the Human World”

  1. Dimitar on May 12th, 2009 2:24 am

    This song is just WOW………I haven’t stopped listening to it since I first heard it. ….on my 10 listen now.

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