Josephine

iTunes Review

Josephine is Jason Molina’s closest alt-country album to date. The frontman for Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Co. has always flirted with the outer reaches of the genre, singing in a lonesome twang and finding the music’s lonely core in sweeping pedal steel and Neil Young-influenced bucking electric guitars, but with Josephine he comes ever closer to the music’s conventions. No longer settling on isolating two-chord dirges, Molina opens up new vistas that are clearly aimed westward. “The Handing Down” powers itself with a solid immovable organ, but “Shenandoah,” “Whip-poor-will” and “Hope Dies Last” feature the sort of forlorn Jack Kerouac-inspired night tripping that can be best explained as the sound of a man obsessed with the melancholic beauty at the heart of Hank Williams and Neil Young at their most stressed and haunted. The beats are tribal and final. The chords for “Map of the Falling Sky” come crashing with a doom that’s reflected in the fact that Molina lost a band member in a house fire and it’s to his ghost that this album is clearly illuminated.