The insight of a lyrically perfect album.

The revelatory beauty of banality in "Pyramid Electric Co".

Even at the website’s peak, I was never an avid Pitchfork reader. In a time before cynicism and bitterness had truly overtaken the World Wide Web, Pitchfork made a mark by being occasionally hyperbolic, vitriolic, and hyper-critical. I don’t fault them for that: they were 1) a site built for citicism and 2) initially staffed almost entirely by idealistic, inexperienced kids with the Bold Indie Kid Ideas that plague anyone who has recently discovered music and decided that music was their whole deal.

But the site was blossoming at the same time I was falling in love with music (and, incidentally, not too long before I made the same Young Kid mistake of trying to be a critic online with the first Never News, when I had no experience doing so). Glancing through Pitchfork headlines/reviews, even if you weren’t responding to the critic’s endorsement or condemnation, was an incredible resource for someone who learned about indie rock after the advent of the internet.

In 2003, I would have been in college, and I was desperate to make music my whole deal. I needed to discover new music because I had to impress upon all these fresh new people in that fresh new town that I was worth knowing. This was before I met my friend family, you see, before I saw the Wyoming band with the worst name of all time and, in doing so, met the people who are still daily presences in my life (despite being hundreds of miles away).

At the end of that year, Pitchfork must have listed Songs: Ohia’s masterpiece Magnolia Electric Co as one of their albums of the year (reviewer Eric Carr gave the album an 8.2). I seem to remember there being MP3s on offer, or maybe I went searching. At any rate, I downloaded “Farewell Transmission” and knew instantly that this was something I needed in my life. Aside from the emo-adjacent country (Bright Eyes & Mayday, for example), alternative country hadn’t quite been on my radar.

As much as I would like to, I can’t say that Magnolia Electric Co changed my life, but it was a damn fine album. It remains a cherished thing, a bright star in all that confusing depression I was going through at the time (and that I continue to go through); Jason Molina wrote what he knew, and what I was just figuring out.

When its spiritual sister album Pyramid Electric Co came out a year later, I knew I had to be in at the ground level. I preordered the album (my first of many Secretly Canadian orders) even though it only came on vinyl and, at 19 or 20, I had no turntable (the LP included a flat-packed CD).

If ever there was an album that sounded like it should change a person’s life, that album is Pyramid Electric Co. Recorded over seven days, the album isn’t Molina at his most stripped back or primal – Songs: Ohia was a lo-fi band at the beginning – but it is him at his late-career heights of understatement: two guitars and a piano, oblique poetry, and the rising voice of an honest-to-god genius.

“You’ll have friends who won’t come home/you’ll see their bones/not separate yet from death/you’ll get used to it”.

For a kid who wanted nothing more than to be a great writer, the language on Pyramid Electric Co was a livewire, a blow to the soul. Molina sings things on this record that insist on epiphany, even when they are mundane. Every line of the album is somehow revelatory; that they are carried along with what feel like meandering, dissonant, and barely crafted guitar notes lends them an even further gravity. At its end, the opening (titular) track dissolves, and an entire second song begins to play beneath it, half-heard and acoustically brutal. A quartet of electric notes plays again and again, drowning it out.

He not only delivers mind-opening insight, he delivers a sort of heartsick love. You fall in love with the painted-up division street girl, a prostitute:

“Painted up division street girl/She's a pretty denim queen/Bird of paradise eyes/Bird of paradise dying eyes/But I could sight read those slangy lips/I could sight right those hips/And anyway out loud she says/Hey sucker

Are you lonely?”

You fall in love with another woman, Honey (or perhaps we are Honey; we are ‘Darling’.), who

“smells a little like a train/hauling lilacs through the rain”.

There are observations like this not just about women, but about the simple aspects of living. We’re told that

“nothing’s got a pulse/in the whole damn place/right down to the clocks/nothing’s got a pulse”

and when we’re told this, we know that we’ve been to the place he’s at. We’ve known a place so oppressive in its stillness that time doesn’t move. The simplicity of these things – the commonplace reality of clocks and lilacs and cigarettes – are universal, banal, and beautiful.

Finding Pyramid Electric Co when I did — 2004, finding my family, beginning the journey from who I was to who I knew I wanted to be — was one of the great gifts given to me by the clumsy circulation of indie rock. To invest what felt like a trillion dollars for a hunk of plastic that, I remind you, I could not play, and doing so without having heard a note, was an act of such profound faith that I can barely recognize it now.

“I wanted to be true like the solid earth”

I never correctly applied the lessons I learned from the album to my songwriting – Wake Megan always wanted to be early The Good Life – but Molina’s poetic sensibilities most certainly worked themselves into my prose and poetry; I struggle, in a great many pieces, to achieve the sort of earnest truth that Molina does with the seven songs on Pyramid. If I could be half the poet I would be happy; if I were an eight of the poet I’d still be improved.

“You called that the curse of a human’s life: that you couldn’t change”

Molina gives us a gift: he makes us observers of the world in a way we’ve never been before. For forty-one and a half glorious minutes, we become aware that the beauty of the minuscule is also the beauty of the infinite, and we weep with it.