Word: johnson
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Molina & Johnson is the collaboration of alt-country legends Will Johnson of Centro-Matic and Jason Molina of Songs: Ohia and The Magnolia Electric Co. In the tradition of many classic country and blues albums, the self-titled release is sparsely orchestrated, contributing to the feeling that it was created by two talented and mournful men kicking back, imbibing, loading shotguns, and playing music...
...soulful and exposed. The duo exhibits an effortless mastery of many classic tropes, employed without pretense to keep the album engaging and honest. Unfortunately the album’s traditional song structures and generally unremarkable music cause the songs to run together, and, at times, it feels like Molina & Johnson are playing the same song with small variations over and over again...
Many of the tracks are more blues than they are country. “All Gone, All Gone,” is about as dismal as the title would suggest. It features a duet between Johnson and Texas songsmith Sarah Jaffe over a plodding guitar line that sounds as if it’s plucked from an early Robert Johnson recording. Featuring a singing saw—an instrument whose existence is easy to forget, but whose presence is impossible to ignore—the song feels like a slow drive down a pitch-black southern road in the heart...
...Molina & Johnson struggle with the limitations of their chosen genre, however, occasionally exhausting their limited supply of musical and thematic tropes. Indicative of the album’s primary shortcoming, “In the Avalon/Little Killer” is a maudlin piano ballad that falls short of the powerful simplicity that “All Gone, All Gone” achieves, and for which it strives. While emotive and marginally moving, the music is fairly boring, never quite leaving the ground. It is chilling, but only slightly so, and while it maintains the unmediated feeling of someone sitting down...
While “Almost Let You In” shows Molina & Johnson pushing their genre to pleasant effect, the tracks that stay comfortably within the genre and play it with an authentic familiarity have just as much merit. Songs like “Twenty Cycles to the Ground” and “Each Star Marks a Day,” while doing nothing to transcend or reinvigorate the genre, are a testament to the preeminent mastery of alt-country exhibited by Molina & Johnson...