It must be hard to be an alt-country musician. Your genre has barely turned old enough to see dirty movies, half of the country thinks you're Hank Williams' pot-smoking grandnephew and most of the other folks think you are Jeff Tweedy.
It is fairly impressive then just how much Jason Molina, formerly of \Songs: Ohia"" and now the central figure of Magnolia Electric Co., has accomplished in the last eight years; recording 10 studio albums between the two outfits, plus multiple live projects.
It would be fair to say that the world-weary, fatalistic What Comes After the Blues? is a product of this straining work schedule, if not for the fact that this is the most upbeat Molina has ever sounded.
What Comes After the Blues?, the first studio album from Magnolia Electric Co., Molina's full-band project, picks up right where Songs: Ohia left off, even taking its name from the older act's final release. The larger, more rock-centered sound that Molina toyed with on that album carries the day here.
The eight tracks cover plenty of ground between the overdriven choruses of the opener, ""At Least the Dark Don't Hide It"" and the slow acoustic strums of ""I Can Not Have Seen the Light."" However, unlike Molina's past work, ""Blues"" is clearly a group effort.
Rather than using the larger cast at his disposal to dramatically reinvent the ""Songs: Ohia"" approach, Molina makes an effort to hone his song craft, turning out more precise ballads with less of the wandering exploration of his older albums, such as the moody, atmospheric ""Ghost Tropic."" The pared-down, relatively concise songwriting works well for Molina, as it steers Blues clear of the pitfalls his 12-minute epics encountered, exhausting the little energy they began with halfway through.
On songs like ""At Least the Dark Don't Hide It,"" one of the stronger tracks lifted from the band's preceding live release, Trials and Errors, biting rhythm guitar pulls one in immediately and holds them all the way through the album.
On the back side of the disk, the two percussion less numbers, ""Northstar Blues"" and ""I Can Not Have Seen The Light"" rely entirely on carefully picked acoustics, moving harmonies and a well-placed fiddle accompaniment.
Aside from these highlights, though, the album feels flat. The vocals on ""The Night Shift Lullaby"" teeter on the brink of being indistinguishable from any other country dirge, and ""Give Something Else Away Everyday"" never wakes up for long enough to let you know it is there.
Lyrically, Blues is a mixed bag. Molina's deference to country music's folksy style at times makes for an odd combination with this slacker sense of humor that sounds almost like Stephen Malkmus.
This dichotomy lays the foundation for lines such as ""The Earth was empty on the day it was made / But Heaven needed a place to throw all their shit."" Most of the time though, Molina sticks strictly to the melancholy, packing songs like ""Hammer Down"" with enough doomed poetics for a Thebian tragedy.
As a whole, What Comes After the Blues? is really neither a towering success nor a failure. The few standout spots on the album are not enough to place Molina ahead of the middle of the alt-country pack, just as the songs do not satisfactorily answer the question posed by the album.
