Let Me Go, Let Me Go

Much like on his solo debut a couple years earlier, Jason Molina sheds both the band name and the full band sound on Let Me Go, Let Me Go, Let Me Go, providing his always intense, personal accounts of devastation and alienation with an intimate setting to match. It's almost as if he uses his position of solitude as an opportunity to excise songs that are too unstable to fit in with Magnolia Electric Co.'s more rock-oriented domain, laying them down with brooding precision while making them feel like unrehearsed first takes. Given ample breathing room, his music unravels with a particularly haunting urgency, most of all due to Molina's singularly plaintive voice, which is as nuanced as it is powerful. Amidst ambient sounds like inexplicable background voices and creaky chairs, the songs fade in and out with little warning, as somber ruminations operating at the same level as the narrator's own confusion and uncertainty. Molina's characters -- always delivered through a first-person voic