Reviewed by Ian Phillips.
By Jason Molina, Bandcamp 2020.
Regular readers will know of my love of the innovative and imprecise.
In short, the human element in music.
The digital age has enabled all musicians to produce works of extraordinary complexity and precision but its mathematical certainty also comes with a sting in the tail.
Humans aren’t 100 per cent precise.
The very best musicians find it difficult to play with exactitude to a click track.
There is always a give and take, a push and pull, from just before the beat to just after it and it is within these tensions that the magic happens.
The question arises.
How much do you conform to the digital certainty verses how much you retain of the human.
How many errors is too many?
It is a dilemma that all musicians struggle with when recording and it also accounts for a lot of modern music coming across as soulless if the desire for perfection takes over.
I recently came across this delightful record by Jason Molina.
Eight Gates contains songs that Jason was working on at the time of his death.
Some were completed or near completion but other are just skeleton sketches.
A number are just Jason and his acoustic guitar laying down the bones of the song, some of which are obviously incomplete.
How was he going to end the song? Would he go back to the chorus? Would he have it drift and fade into the ether?
Some songs take a long time to write.
Some never get satisfactorily completed.
Between a number of tracks we can hear Jason talking to the sound engineer or other people in the studio and consequently we can’t help but being drawn into that short and precious time just before he was gone forever.
This nine track album really is quite magical because it’s so personal and revealing AND so human.
It questions us to define what we mean by “finished”.
The centrepiece of the album is a track called She Says which is one of the most complete songs on the disc.
It’s followed by Fire On The Rail which actually has Jason singing for nearly a minute totally unaccompanied.
Each song builds a picture of an artist that I wish I’d discovered earlier.
To my ears this album is perfectly “finished”.
There are the sounds of imperfections but there is pure joy and some cracking songs. A perfect legacy.
