Disc of the day
Heaven 17 - Penthouse And Pavement
From Sheffield, synth pop and funk to stick it to Thatcher. Currently being played live!
Features Disc of the day
Songs: Ohia
Ghost Tropic
(Secretly Canadian, 2000)
Creeping glacier of pitch-black devastation from Jason Molina's cast-off alter-ego.
Consider this a call-out to aficionados of the "3am album". No, not this, or this, but those special records that should only be played, with weary soul, in the smallest of hours, albums that thrive in that dark pocket of time after the temperature drops and the heartbeat slows, when the very air itself feels heavy. Side two of On The Beach flies the flag, so does John Martyn's Inside Out and Bonnie 'Prince' Billy's I See A Darkness. These are not recordings to slumber to. They are for the last ones awake.
Ghost Tropic, Jason Molina's fifth LP as Songs: Ohia, exists in exactly this state, moving like a black molasses of resigned defeat, just one long burdensome sigh. An anchor weighs down every guitar string, the acoustics are eerie, haunted, and Molina's voice sounds so baked it is surely familiar with Neil Young's recipe for honey slides. In No Limit On The Words, exhausted and breathless, Molina strains to explain that "Simply to live/That was my plan". Elsewhere, the percussion that drives Lightning Risked It All harks back to Tom Waits' Shore Leave, but somehow sapped of colour, an apt evocation of the album title: the exotic stripped down to a shadow of itself. Meanwhile, the pulsing twelve-minute centrepiece Not Just A Ghost's Heart and bleak closer Incandescent set a blueprint for the kind of gloomy phantom-folk adopted by Phosphorescent and Micah P Hinson. Even the birds on the two instrumental tracks sound weary.
Molina went on to make other great records (2002's Didn't It Rain, especially) but he never returned to an ebb this low. The band became Magnolia Electric Co. in 2003 and their most recent record is very good - it's warm and melodic; bright, even. But who wants that? Here's to the night shift.
Sonny Baker
Posted by Ross_Bennett at 6:00 AM GMT 17/12/2009
Further Listening
Songs: Ohia - Didn't It Rain (Secretly Canadian, 2002)
Neil Young - On The Beach (Reprise, 1974)
Bonnie Prince Billy - I See A Darkness (Domino, 1999)
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Heaven 17 - Penthouse And Pavement
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