Molasses

Although Molasses started humbly, Scott Chernoff has seen his experiments grow into a full-blown collective, with members of GY!BE, Shalabi Effect and Codeine all joining in on the action. An incredibly tight and evocative listen, Trouble at Jinx Hotel pours out its fragile heart with an assortment of simple strums, singing saws and other surprising instrumentation that both has roots in old Americana and a foot firmly pressed on the reverb pedal of today. "Las Ninas” affects with its simple yet frail melodies and "Siren’s Song” opens the album strongly with the gorgeous singing voice of Jennifer Menard subtly adding to the proceedings. Atonal bursts run throughout the songs, with the most effective being with "Miss Peach’s Pawnshop,” while "Coda” brings it to an extreme that doesn’t seem necessary considering the less is more approach on many of the songs here. On earlier albums like You’ll Never Be Well No More, Molasses’ songs were somewhat slight and happy to aimlessly wander around in a haze of homage and experimentation, but Jinx shows those days are happily over. Proving that sound can be exhilarating through the simplest of methods, Molasses has created a paean to older music but never losing themselves in the novelty of emulation, or, more cleverly, they are not haunted by the past, but they sure do make it haunting.