Songs: Ohia Elicits Yawning

Alum Molina Gives Vacuous Performance

Back In Town: Alum Jason Molina (OC '96) of Songs:Ohia played the 'Sco Thursday night. (photo by Pauline Shapiro)

The Dionysis Disco was host Thursday night to rock act Songs: Ohia, with support from Royal City. Led by (and confined to) Jason Molina (OC '96), the one man band that is Songs: Ohia kicked off the reading period with a shrug. Advance billing for the show was in no short supply. In reference to the latest studio effort of the Chicago-based "band," its record label (Secretly Canadian) wrote, in a blurb culled for promotional use by WOBC, "Blending the electro-acoustic minimalism of the David Bowie and Brian Eno trilogy with the percussive worldliness of Tom Waits' SWORDFISHTROMBONES, the group seems to hop the globe from a British folk-rock influence to an Ennio Morricone-like spaghetti western feel to the faintest echoes of the Chinese classical ringing in the background like a death murmur in the distance."

For the staggering multitudes of thirteen year-old "singer-songwriters" with new electric guitars attempting roughly the sort of laborious insipidity unleashed by Songs: Ohia on the 'Sco stage tonight, the notion that bland vocals and a couple of apathetically strummed power chords can draw this sort of praise from anyone can only be seen as a resounding affirmation. Presumably, however, the age and wisdom of Oberlin students enables them to laugh at such rhetorical balderdash. Or does it?

The scene at the 'Sco was grim. Framing his songs with two minute denouncements of the P.A. system, Molina moved through the set with his trademark languor. Pairing a static palette of roughly four or five power chords with stylishly indifferent vocals, he seemed to sleepwalk through a selection of dirge-paced, nuance-free numbers. Sadly, the lack of musical spark and/or performing acumen was more reminiscent of Spaghetti O's than spaghetti western. And Chinese classical ringing in the background? Nary a note of it, though there was ample yawning in the background by concert-goers at the gates of slumber.

The opening group was Royal City, four normal-looking guys with a compulsion for mentioning that they hail from Canada. They sounded like Buffalo Tom.

After the show, most people went to bed, while a smaller number took advantage of the nascent reading period to read, or to trudge computerward and type an article. It was a good night after all.