Various Swell Sounds is a new collaborative playlist series from Shana Hartzel of Swell Tone, Jon Chin of Cereal and Sounds, and myself. Instead of constantly exchanging tracks amongst each other, we have decided to work together to bring them to more ears. Every month, we will match a selection of our old and brand new favourites to a specific theme, as decided on a revolving basis month by month.

It only comes around every four years, so this month we’ve hopped aboard the World Cup hype train. We encountered a bit of a hitch when realising that there aren’t a wealth of football/soccer related indie tunes, especially when 2/3 of the curating team reside in the US. Thus, Beautiful Games was born, a playlist that widens the net to encompass all sports, and plays a little loose with the sound and style, meaning this might not the most cohesive list you’ll ever get from us. Still, that’s cool. The World Cup is all about a diverse clash of styles, after all.

Find the tracklisting below, though due to Spotify’s limited library, that version isn’t quite complete.

1. Parquet Courts – Total Football
2. Speedy Ortiz – Basketball
3. Ex Hex – Don’t Wanna Lose
4. Amyl and The Sniffers – Cup of Destiny
5. Queen Moo – Goals
6. Darla – Hey Ref, Let the Boys Play!
7. Varsity – Smash
8. Gulfer – Baseball
9. The Lagoonas – Beach Golf Course
10. Summer Flake – Shoot and Score
11. Methyl Ethel – Shadowboxing
12. John Maus – Touchdown
13. The Fall – Kicker Conspiracy
14. Slow Ref – Playing the Game
15. Stephen Malkus and The Jicks – Chartjunk
16. Hello Shark – Big Game
17. The Mountain Goats – Song for Sasha Banks
18. Another Michael – Football
19. Deerhoof – Basketball Get Your Groove Back
20. Super Furry Animals – Venus & Serena
21. Sports Coach – I’d Trade My Whole Team for a Dog
22. Ian Sweet – #23
23. Mothers – No Crying in Baseball
24. Spartan Jet-Plex – Sport
25. Strange Ranger – Sioux Falls
26. Her’s – Speed Racer
27. Frog – Nancy Kerrigan
28. Belle & Sebastian – The Stars of Track and Field
29. Natalie Prass – Short Court Style
30. Songs: Ohia – The Big Game is Every Night

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Here are some great songs from the tumultuous year that was 2003.

1) The Thermals – No Culture Icons
2) The Wrens – Ex-Girl Collection
3) Wintersleep – Orca
4) Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Maps
5) Sun Kil Moon – Carry Me Ohio
6) Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy – Hard Life
7) Califone – Million Dollar Funeral
8) Okkervil River – The War Criminal Rises and Speaks
9) Sufjan Stevens – Romulus
10) Hymie’s Basement – Lightning Bolts and Man Hands
11) The National – Lucky You
12) Malcolm Middleton – Cold Winter
13) Damien Jurado – Amateur Night
14) Cursive – Sierra
15) The Constantines – Shine a Light
16) Casiotone for the Painfully Alone – Jeanne, If You’re Ever in Portland
17) The Unicorns – I Was Born a Unicorn
18) The Decemberists – Red Right Ankle
19) Songs: Ohia – Farewell Transmission

What did we miss from 2003? Let us know via Facebook or Twitter! Be sure to check out our posts on 2000, 2001 and 2002, and pop back in a month when we’ll be turning our attention to… 2004.

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Tracklisting

1. Saturday Night – The Wooden Sky
2. Wings – Field Report
3. Infestation – Bear Medicine
4. Cigarettes – Oquoa
5. Chris Bell – M. Lockwood Porter
6. Ride On, Molina – Rivulets
7. Farewell Transmission – Songs: Ohia
8. HSKT – Sylvan Esso
9. Reconstruct (feat. Seafloor) – Photay
10. Second Night – Mansionair
11. Beacon – DEAREST
12. Sweetness – Wayne Szalinksi
13. Yellow Leaves – Ezkiel
14. Travel Advisory – Baby Mollusk
15. ESRT (2001) – Whatever, Dad
16. Black Kettle – Real Life Buildings
17. Six Dollar Sunglasses – Steve Palmer
18. I Have Heard of a Land – C.Strøm
19. Blue Ridge Mountain Blues – Wes Tirey
20. Breaking Bad – Talons’
21. Raft – Sarah Winchester
22. Ontario Gothic – Foxes in Fiction
23. Thrown – Kiasmos
24. You (Nate Connelly Rework) – Nils Frahm
25. Form By Firelight (With Raphaelle Standell) – Jon Hopkins
26. Lights – Mt. Judge
27. I Love – David Karsten Daniels

Remember that we make a mix like this every month, so if you want even more cool new music then head over to the Wake the Deaf 8tracks page, or read the site itself!

October 2014 Mix from Wake The Deaf on 8tracks Radio.

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So my plan is to write about some of my favourite of Molina’s songs in the hope of inspiring you to delve deeper into his back-catalogue yourself.

Firstly, a quick bit of background info. If you’re not already familiar with his work, you should know that Molina recorded under various guises, leading bands under the names Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Co., and also recording solo records under his own name. He also released a really good album with Will Johnson (of Centro-matic) and also released a one off record under the moniker Amalgamated Sons of Rest with Will Oldham and Alasdair Roberts. The vast majority of his records were released by Secretly Canadian.

Unsurprisingly for a career which spanned over 15 years, Molina’s music morphed and modified, filling a variety of niches and casting the man himself in a variety of guises. There is the stark and haunting folk music of his earliest Songs: Ohia releases, the blood-and-thunder indie rock of later ones and even country-inflected classic rock on the later Magnolia Electric Co. albums. But every album also has something in common, something unique to the man himself. Much of his music deals with life as an outsider, the constant struggle with feelings of inadequacy and isolation. But there is also something else, a sliver of beautiful glittering hope in the darkness. This is illustrated by Molina’s refusal to simply give in, his determination to persevere, his emphasis on how important it is to “try”.

I’ve chosen a collection of my very favourite Jason Molina tracks. It is in no way intended to be definitive, and a second person could easily choose an entirely different set of songs. For example, ‘Hold on, Magnolia’, ‘Just Be Simple’ and ‘Don’t it Look Like Rain’ have not made it on the list, despite being songs that I love more than most. Anyways, here we go…

Honey, Watch Your Ass

My first choice is taken from Pyramid Electric Co., a solo album released in 2004. To me it displays some of the finest lyricism, not just in Molina’s vast discography, but in music in general. See for example:

“She nearly burned the town again
With the look that she gave him
She covers her heart
With her hands and says a little useless praying
Never hurt anything”

And, in what I think must be one of my favourite lines of all time:

“That must be her up there
Perfume and cigarette smoke in her wild hair
She smells a little like a train
Hauling lilacs through the rain”

Darling…

‘Darling…’ appeared on Hecla & Griper, an EP released by Songs: Ohia way back in 1997. It’s not actually a Molina song, rather a cover of country artist Conrad Twitty. The beauty for me is that there is not a shred of irony in this cover. It’s a raw and lonely-sounding break-up song, a desperate plea for reconciliation from a lost love:

“Hello darling, it’s nice to see you
It’s been a long time
How’s your new love are you happy
Hope you’re doing alright
Just to know this means so much to me
What’s that darling, how am I doing
Guess I’m doing alright except I can’t sleep
And I cry all night till dawn
What I’m trying to say is that I love you and
I miss you and I’m sorry that I done you wrong”

Hecla & Griper was reissued on its 15^th anniversary (plus bonus tracks). Get it via Secretly Canadian.

Didn’t It Rain

Another Songs: Ohia track next, this time from the 2002 album of the same name (which has also recently been reissued as a deluxe package). ‘Didn’t It Rain’ is a heartfelt ode to both the hope and the hopelessness of existence. It opens with a consolation:

“No matter how dark the storm gets overhead
They say someone’s watching from the calm at the edge”

And continues as a kind of empathetic pep-talk.

“If they think you got it they’re going to beat it out of you
With work and debt whatever all else there is
You got to watch your own back
Try to see the light of goodness burning down the track
Through the blinding rain through the swaying wires”

This is Molina addressing things head-on, saying to his listeners, “yeah things are tough but here’s what we can do about it”. Emphasis on the “we”. There is solidarity here, a we’re-all-in-this-together call to arms to just keep going.

Whip-poor-will

This track didn’t appear on a proper album until a re-worked version was included on Magnolia Electric Co.’s 2009 album Josephine. But the version I am including on my list is a demo played by a lone Molina on his guitar (which you can hear on the bonus disc of the 10^th anniversary edition of Magnolia Electric Co.). ‘Whip-poor-will’ is wonderfully simple and full of a certain sense of resolute melancholy. With lines such as:

“So all of you folks in heaven not too busy ringing the bell
Some of us down here ain’t doing very well”

And:

“Still waiting
For you to sing that song again
The one you were singing at the very fall of man
It ain’t hallelujah but it might as well have been”

O! Grace

‘O! Grace’, from Josephine, is the latest of my choices and is included mainly to illustrate the deviance in sound from the earlier Songs: Ohia albums. What we get here is almost a traditional country song, complete with a pseudo-sing-along chorus of:

“Oh Grace, if you stop believing
That don’t mean that it just goes away
It’s a long way between horizons
And it gets farther every day”

Farewell Transmission

This is the opening track on Magnolia Electric Co., the album which many regard as Molina’s magnum opus. ‘Farewell Transmission’ is a rock song of epic scope, in which Molina threw together all of his friends and creative energies in seven and a half minutes of pure searing force. It begins with a swagger, and immediately sounds bigger than anything Molina had made before. The real highlight is the lyrics, which are jam-packed with stark, forlorn imagery of dying moons and strange shamanistic rituals. With passages such as:

“After tonight if you don’t want us to be a secret out of the past
I will resurrect it, I’ll have a good go at it
I’ll streak his blood across my beak and dust my feathers with his ashes
I can feel his ghost breathing down my back”

And:

“Mama here comes midnight, with the dead moon in its jaws
Must be the big star about to fall”

The song also contains some lines which relate back to Molina’s favourite lyrical themes, and turns out to be one place where he expresses himself particularly eloquently:

“The real truth about it is no one gets it right
The real truth about it is we’re all supposed to try”

It is lines like this which created the adoring fandom, which turned people from casual listeners to zealous followers (including Strand of Oaks’s Timothy Showalter). And the reason? Because they offer comfort. Here is a man who spent his artistic career documenting his life’s struggles, beaming out his thoughts to thousands of lonely people around the country. And his message (in these two short lines at least) was a powerful one. He’s saying that we should all just keep going, that we are all doing okay.

Long Desert Train

To conclude I have chosen what is perhaps my favourite Jason Molina song of all. ‘Long Desert Train’ is another solo track, the shattering terminus of Pyramid Electric Co.. This is a very, very sad song, even for a man who made a living writing sad songs. It looks the sensation of inadequacy and a complete lack of self-worth straight in the eye. It feels like an outpouring of vulnerability, a rare faultering in the noble intentions of resilience and perseverance. It is a sad song with sadder end, and one which has added poignancy after Molina’s premature demise:

“Said you’d never be old enough
Or young enough
Tall enough
Or thin enough
Or smart enough
Or brave enough
Rich enough
Pretty enough
Strong enough
Good enough
Well you were to us

You wanted silence by itself
Just the word
You wanted peace by itself
Just to learn
There were things you couldn’t change
You got the dull pounding rain
You got the last car in the long desert train

You almost made it”

You can buy the vast majority of Jason Molina’s music via Secretly Canadian.

P.S. The last year or so has seen various Jason Molina tribute albums, including Farwell Transmission: A Tribute To Jason Molina from Rock The Cause and a collection of tributes and compilations from The Wave Pictures.

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I Sleep Alone is a beautifully human, sounding simultaneously hushed and impassioned, delicate and raw. The negative space that intersperses each guitar note has an emotional heft, an almost tangible substance that snakes around like fog. The lyrics are superb, and the whole thing has a depth that requires repeated listens to even begin to appreciate. It’s a bona fide “slowcoustic” album, with parallels to all of the modern greats (Molina, Tillman, Jurado et al.).

This is an album that deals with isolation and sadness in a way that is admirably honest. It also has that all-important quality that offers a glimpse of something more, something better. This means that the pervading sense of melancholy and isolation never becomes overbearing, and in fact the listener can find comfort in these tales of spiritual solitude.

‘Flesh Turn’ starts with some atmospherics that wouldn’t have been out of place on Hospice, and then develops into a intimate lament, bristling with a quiet intensity (until this restraint cracks rather spectacularly). One track that came to my mind was Damien Jurado’s ‘Amateur Night’ (from Where Shall You Take Me?) which was similarly hushed and pregnant with raw emotion.

‘Heart Carries the Blame’ is slightly more upbeat, with some nice electric guitar. It also contains the stand-out line, “I’m full of shit, but I mean it”. ‘Stars Pt. 2’ is yet another slice of sublime sorrow, and serves as a tribute to Jason Molina (the second one we’ve covered recently, after Strand of Oak’s ‘JM’) and even sneaks a line of his in there. Molina himself would have been proud of album closer ‘Ships and Stones’, a real slow burner with languid electric guitars and emotive delivery. It’s a fitting end to a truly fine album.

I Sleep Alone will be released tomorrow (the 8th of July). You can pre-order it now via Big School Records in a variety of formats and assorted bundles. This is one of my favourite albums released this year, I highly recommend you get it right now.

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