Jason Molina - Let Me Go, Let Me Go, Let Me Go

“Night wind and the crossroad and the blue ghost’s name / all start with ‘danger’ / the letter ‘danger’”

Live Jason Molina’s diminutive figure belies the power of his voice; slight and rotund, singing contorts Molina’s face into a living metaphor for his music – pained, beautifully expressive and full of yearning. He’s been releasing records under various pseudonyms (Songs: Ohia, Magnolia Electric Co., Amalgamated Sons of Rest) for a decade now; strangely, apart from production values, little has changed. The first Songs: Ohia record was just him and his guitar, subtle and sad in much the same way as Let Me Go, Let Me Go, Let Me Go. Perhaps the most notable development has been his work with Magnolia Electric Co.: part Neil Young country, part Richard Thompson folk, a collaboration with, amongst others, Mike Kapinus of Okkervil River.

Let Me Go…, however, exists in a totally different realm to either Magnolia Electric Co. albums. From the first track, ‘It’s Easier Now’, with its desolate timbre and lonely piano, the record shivers under the weight of its melancholy, Molina explaining, “it’s easier now that I just say, ‘I got better’”. Similarly on the following song, ‘Everything Should Try Again’, he asks, in something between a wail and whisper, “you’ve been tired and a little sick / you’ve been trying to work with it”. Throughout ‘Let Me Go…’ there’s a pervading resignation in the face of decline and sadness, a gnawing sensation that the end of the line has been reached: on ‘Don’t It Look Like Rain’ he calmly intones, “the wolf outside my door don’t need anymore of my blood”. This is a desolate, desperately sparse record, so bare that it feels starved, sapped of love, drained of any life-force.

In many ways Let Me Go... is a sister album to Damien Jurado’s And Now That I'm In Your Shadow, also released on Secretly Canadian. But whereas that record was drenched in a cloak of narrative (relatives shot, lovers missing), Let Me Go... exists in a vacuum; the title’s repetition a clue to language’s powerlessness. Francis Bacon’s paintings are so visceral and engaging because they exist outside of story; framed by only a self imposed cube, the figures are taught and tight, almost trying to stretch off the canvas to escape their pain. Molina has in the past sung of “the dark / and the events that take place in the dark”: on Let Me Go... he's created a universe as tortured as Bacon's, where actions and their setting are totally removed from each other. ‘Get Out Get Out Get Out’ echoes the album title, an imperative that can never be answered, yet desperately needs to be: “get out while there’s still something left of us”.

On ‘Don’t It Look Like Rain’ he sings, “I live for nothing anymore”; with just a solitary guitar for accompaniment his voice sounds like it’s dissolving into the emptiness, fighting its own futility, repeating words in a vain attempt to avoid evaporating forever. At just 34 minutes long Let Me Go... is frighteningly intense, a tiny, self-enclosed, claustrophobic world bereaved of hope.

I imagine Molina alone on an empty street, singing to the owls that populate all of his records, the rain falling, gradually growing at his feet.

“Some things never get better / some things never try”