"You always said I'd make it out - somehow I knew I never would"

I'll declare my hand early: I love Jason Molina - he's a man who can break my heart with a couple of well placed words like no other can. Just recently he explained how it all works when he let on that he tries to write rock n roll haikus the way Hank Williams used to (why sing 5 words when you can get it down to 2?) - and on this record (his 12th!) the bleakness of the words are heightened even more by the sound of a band in full flight.

Those of you who managed to get your hands on the recent "Trials and Errors" live CD would have heard a different side to Jason Molina - all fire and brimstone and rockin as hard as Neil did on 'Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere' (some of it so tongue in cheek it's a wonder he could get the words out). "The Dark Don't Hide It" leads off both albums and is a monster of a song: "you said you only wanted friends for long enough to get rid of them". Ouch! The live version has it all over the album version, simply because it sounds SO BRUTAL. A true 'moment'.

"But you know darling half of what a man says is a lie"

But it's the last 3 songs on 'What Comes After the Blues' that pushes it over the edge into the truly great: 'Hammer Down' being a textbook Molina suicide song to calm the nerves: "sometimes I forget how I've always been sick and I don't have the strength to keep fighting it'. Lullabies for the brokenhearted. Then there's 'Northstar Blues' and 'I Can Not Have Seen the Light' - both proving the point of Jason being a succesor to Hank's throne, the former with a fiddle sound ripped straight from one of Hank's old 78s, while the later pointing out their differences; while Hank sang 'I saw the light', Jason can only manage to get out 'I thought I saw the light' (and in 'Hammer Down' when he does sing "I saw the light" it takes on a much darker meaning).

"No one should forgive me - I know what I stood to lose"

Let's put our cards on the table: if you're STILL sitting around waiting for Neil Young to make another 'Zuma', or wish Lynyrd Skynyrd were as good as 'Freebird' was meant to sound, or wished Townes Van Zandt had have got a real band behind him, or...