2013-05-19T16:55:07-04:00 Dudley Colley http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=dudley-colley Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Dudley Colley Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2906279 2013-03-19T08:03:20-04:00 2013-05-19T05:12:01-04:00

Dudley Colley http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dudley-colley/
I can't confess to have known Jason well at all, but he absolutely touched and influenced my life and - as I'm being stunned to see as grief and sorrow floods Facebook etc. - the lives of many others. I don't think I've noticed the passing of a small independent musician reverberating so much.

When we went to make our first record it was a Songs:Ohia album that enchanted us and sent us to Scotland to try and capture some of the mystery and elegance we heard in its grooves. We sent him the pre-release tapes of it and received the most wonderful note back, full of joy and encouragement and kind words, traits that all those grieving for him immediately recall, rather than the despair that must have been always coring away at him inside.

I first met Jason back in 2000/2001 when he played Dublin and my fledgling band was starting to operate. As best I remember it the association actually began when his Songs:Ohia band mates came to see us play and we ended up hammered, arm in arm on the dance floor roaring along to The Song Remains the Same. Jason wasn't there as such hard partying didn't appear to be his style. He preferred to retire to his room and write. He was the calm one, the sensible one, the hard worker getting up at 4am to pour out more songs. We didn't know all the raging of the storm was contained within.

We met him properly the next day, where much to the mortification of his band mates he, with great delight, told us of the drunken chaos they got up to in the hotel room while he pretended to sleep. I'm not telling.

A plan was hatched for Jason, his band mate Dan Sullivan, our drummer Joss and myself to retire to a house in the Dublin mountains and play some music. Memories are vague, but I can picture Jason breaking out a bottle of Knob Creek, us four stupid young men throwing out a thousand "who wants to sup from the knob?" jokes, dressing up in stupid clothes, christening ourselves the 'Pink Pirates' and trying, very badly, to invent new Thin Lizzy riffs until dawn. We'd been friends a day, but in those hours had been friends for a hundred years.

On our first US tour in 2002, he personally booked us a show in Bloomington, Indiana, under the guise of a Songs:Ohia show and refused to take any payment to make sure we got as much money from the show as possible. Just decent.

We spent a beautiful night sitting on his porch batting away every moth and mosquito trying to crash the party, talking nonsense and just revelling in the company of this wonderful man, and thinking what a spectacular home and wife he had, a seemingly idyllic life. Seemingly.

After that, I didn't hear from him again for over a decade, and was shocked as the news broke how troubled and how much trouble he was in. We waited and assumed. Out of the blue last year I got a message just saying "Big hugs from Indianapolis" and the relief was great. Jason was on the way back.

Pink Pirate down...

Jason Molina 1973 - 2013]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2629347 2013-02-06T19:00:00-05:00 2013-04-08T05:12:01-04:00

Dudley Colley http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dudley-colley/
It's unlikely, and these are all garlands that swing around the neck of this, certainly unique, record.

Apart from a few early bolters, there's a been a collective effort by reviewers to not pounce on m b v and to try and let the quality of the record fend for itself above the weight of its occasion. For it not to have been brutally disappointing after the 22 year long wait since Loveless would have been an achievement in itself, but with repeated plays the dawning realisation that its actually brilliant is utterly remarkable.

It starts with a sly wink, you press play and the first track just sort of rolls into being, "Oh HAI guys, we've just been over here the whole time", unearthly guitars start to spar via the speakers over a lumbering rumble that certainly grounds itself in the parameters of Loveless but more as a jumping off point than a re-tread.

We move on and things get more urgent, the drums have none of the clinical precision of before, and clatter and thunder under a turgid riff, Bilinda Butcher coo-ing over the top before a wicked, so dumb it's amazing, solo kicks in. As the record carries on its fair to say the first half of the LP certainly operates in the same ballpark as the music My Bloody Valentine were making before their hiatus, but its churlish to condemn it for that. Many plundered and imitated, but no-one else ever sounded like this.

The games commence though when stepping back and trying to figure out the genesis of the record. For my tuppence worth, I think the album charts a chronological path from the band they were in 1991 to the future music the LP tails off with. I also reckon most, if not all, the LP was recorded relatively recently. The stunning production belies itself immediately, studios of the 90's just couldn't capture sound this well, and from the get go, beneath the maelstrom, the voices have that slight weathered thinness that age brings. Can't wait for the Behind the Music.

I'm loath to even describe much of the rest of the album, simply because every listen is leaving me a little more in awe, and I don't want to try and pin it down yet. That said I'll throw in my slack jawed reaction to last tune wonder 2. On my first listen to m b v I was trying to rock my six-month-old son back to sleep and found myself dozing on the couch with him. This... thing... just started bellowing out of the speakers and my half asleep head just burst. Utterly disorientating and overwhelming, if the previous 40-odd minutes hadn't reminded you who's boss the point is emphatically made now. And, like the LP just falls into place at the beginning, it similarly just falls out of place at the end.

No sudden stop, no fade out, they just disappear again...

This post originally appeared on Irish music site www.thumped.com]]>