Rediscover:
Songs: Ohia
The Lioness
2000
Ohio-based singer-songwriter Jason Molina has had an incredible output over the last 12 years, releasing something in the neighborhood of two dozen albums and EPs. In that time, Molina’s fans have seen him move from a minimal guitar and sometime a cappella arrangement to embracing bluesgrass, and later a full-on rock outfit with Magnolia Electric Co. His songwriting has grown as well, from the romantic overtones of Axxess & Ace to the lyrical and pastoral epics of Didn’t It Rain and the song-cycles of his latest, Josephine. With such diversity, fans have the luxury of picking and choosing not just their favorite albums, but favorite incarnations of Molina. Hidden among his many albums released under the Songs: Ohia moniker, in a year in which he recorded three records, 2000′s The Lioness stands out like smoldering coals in a dark night. It’s an album of stark and vivid imagery, one that almost stalks the listener.
Despite an early commitment to being a solo artist, Molina was nevertheless no stranger to collaboration, having enlisted the aid of Edith Frost and other session musicians on earlier albums like Axxess & Ace, The Lioness however saw him decamp to Glasgow, Scotland where he recruited Mogwai producer Andy Miller, as well as Aidan Moffat and David Gow of Arab Strap, and Alistair Roberts.
The album opens with the desperation of “Black Crow” and Molina’s pilgrimage to Scotland is immediately apparent. Much of the Midwestern twang of other albums has been stripped away; all that remains is Molina’s voice, surrounded by the rippling hum of Moffat and Gow’s instruments. Molina’s delivery is restrained, his cry of “It’s fading” at the end of “Black Crow” is rarely paralleled by the emo screams of more earnest singers in a subsequent era. Much of The Lioness is made all the more heartbreaking by its apparent coldness. A Pitchfork reviewer commented that the love songs here were not as make-out friendly as those on Axxess & Ace. It’s true, the love that Molina sings about is an unhealthy one, but it’s one he cannot escape from. The title track contains a sense of fatal longing “I will swim to you/ Whether you save me/ Whether you savage me.” This all consuming passion powers the album, as he offers his love as “Proof that the heart is a risky fuel to burn.” Elsewhere, he adds that “Being in love means you’re completely broken” and that true love is tantamount to self-destruction and submission, “Want my last look to be the moon in your eyes/ Want you to lick my blood off your paws.“
These are some heavy sentiments, but the woman that haunts Molina is powerful and cruel, depicting her in raw animal terms in “The Tigress” and “The Lioness;” Molina describes her eyes as viper black in “Coxcomb Red” (an image he would revisit on Trials And Errors’s “Such Pretty Eyes For A Snake”), implying a resolute and purposeful will. She appears elemental and his desire for her is all encompassing, “I wanted that heat so bad/ I could taste the fire on your breath.” She “holds the sun in [her] arms as he bled to death.” The world grows pales as well, for Molina’s lover draws all kinds of life and energy into her vortex, a storm that he wants so badly, “I could taste the lightning on your breath.”
Molina leaves us with a final image of twisted co-dependency on “Just A Spark”, a look from her that is “like a dagger from your heart into mine.” That Pitchfork reviewer who complained that it would be hard to play The Lioness during make-out sessions was right, it’s far more suited to dark nights and dark thoughts, to lonely distances and unfulfilled desires. Molina might have been in Glasgow for its recording, but his heart was clearly somewhere else.
by Sean Marchetto
