Molina and Johnson

Molina and Johnson was a collaboration between Jason Molina and Will Johnson of Centro-matic.  Although billed as a collaboration they tend not to sing together, mainly taking a song each on the album.  Nevertheless it hangs together well as an album.  Johnson's contributions are generally more accessible, tracks like Twenty Circles to the Ground, Don't Take My Night From Me and Lenore's Lullaby are decent quality, if fairly standard alt-country singer-songwriter fare.  All Gone, All Gone is a dark country-blues duet with Sarah Jaffe and is something of a highlight.

Molina on the other hand brings a more haunted, austere quality to his songs, more akin to his work as Songs:Ohia rather than Magnolia Electric Co.  All Falls Together features dead slow, spacey guitar and Molina's spooked-out wail.  The downcast strum Almost Let You In is the one true duet featuring both Johnson and Molina trading verses and it's pretty fine.  Later into the album, Now, Divide is mainly just the pair of them harmonising wordlessly over guitar rumbles.  For As Long As It Will Matter features a fairly forlorn keyboard part and Molina's broken-hearted lyric about "all my mistakes right where you'd hope for them to happen".  34 Blues is even sparser, just Molina and a lightly strummed guitar in the dead of night.

So although the album gives both artists equal billing, the further into the album we go, having started out like a Will Johnson album, later Jason Molina comes more to the fore.