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Magnolia Electric Co., "Trials and Errors"
Live albums are a tricky lot. Very few are actually representative of the live music experience. If recorded well, they can deliver a very close approximation of a band's live sound, but they ultimately by their very nature fail to deliver any sense of the band's visual performance. With Jason Molina's Magnolia Electric Co., this is perhaps not a huge loss.
They play their songs with a perfunctory stage presence, not moving around very much, and so besides a few frenetic guitar solos, not much is missed without the visuals. I think I might be doing some injustice to seeing MEC live, such as ignoring the interplay between band and crowd and the overall fervor and excitement in the club/concert hall, but very few live albums have ever been able to capture sufficiently the combination of kinetic and potential energy at a truly compelling live performance. In order to supplement the lack of a visual element, the live album needs to record not just the energy and sound of the performer but also the crowd's energy and sound (the latter being less important since crowd chatter can be quite a detriment to the band's actual sound). Documenting these two separate energies as they intertwine and feed off one another makes the experience more palpable and real to the listener of the live album. James Brown's "Live at the Apollo" is the foremost example of a live album which perfects this blend. "Trials and Errors" is no "Live at the Apollo," but it does have a elegantly rendered and recorded Magnolia Electric Co. performance which is valuable both for the seasoned Songs: Ohia veteran and the neophyte. An estimable bootlegging culture (fully endorsed by the band) has arisen around Jason's Molina's projects over the last few years: there is an entire website dedicated to sharing of live material and it is exciting largely because there are plenty of songs in Molina's repertoire which never make it into the studio for a proper recording treatment. What Trials and Errors accomplishes is one of the better sounding recordings of a show from Brussels in 2003 featuring some Magnolia standards from 2004 as well as songs which are to be recorded for the upcoming studio full-length, What Comes After the Blues. The album works well as a promotional piece for the studio album and perhaps that was part of the reasoning behind its release. To me, however, that sounds a little too calculating for a band whose main ambition seems to be to play a lot of shows and to write a lot of songs. There are a few cuts ("Cross the Road" and "Ring the Bell") from the grand Didn't It Rain album which are comforting just to remind us that songs from the Songs: Ohia era have not been forsaken. Whereas those songs had a driving and forceful eye-on-the-prize execution on Didn't It Rain Magnolia Electric Co. give them a meandering and less straight-ahead treatment which is in line with the overall tenor of Molina's present ensemble. "North Star" and "Leave the City" are familiar to Ohia fans who heard these songs on the radio broadcast from Brussels in 2003 when Molina played them solo and stripped down to their most vulnerable, bare, and beautiful. The songs were inconceivably amazing then and since then MEC has adapted them well for the full band, adding the typical band instrumentation along with some trumpet to delicately ornament the whole presentation. Other live standards like "The Dark Don't Hide It," "Don't This Look Like the Dark," "The Big Beast" (sometimes called "The Mess We're In"), and "Almost Was Good Enough" seem to pop up at every live show the band plays and accordingly they do so here with enough aplomb but perhaps a little less excitement and vigor. Molina tacks his variation of Neil Young's "Out on the Weekend" onto "Almost Was Good Enough" almost as a preemptive strike (though issued too late) against critics who bemoan Young's influence on man. The remaining two songs are recent concoctions which have a good probability of turning up on new album. "The Last 3 Human Words" is a quiet and constant rumination recalling Bob Seger's more introspective moments, while "Such Pretty Eyes For a Snake" is a long narrative song (pre- or post-lapsarian, your choice) which climaxes aggressively and then falls asleep innocuously by the end.
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