In The Fade - GoldMolina TonyGenre: RockDescription: EDITORIAL REVIEWS Tony Molina loves and appreciates a well-crafted song and he's one of the absolute best in the game at writing them. What he doesn't love so much is being told he's maturing as a musical artist. His last solo album had what could be described as a jangly '60s-ish sound and some listener reactions threw him off a bit. I kept hearing: 'Oh he's maturing he's getting into other shit writing more mature stuff' he says. I thought 'Man that's kinda lame no I'm not...' Any time somebody expects something of me I'm usually gonna do the opposite. Running the other way isn't exactly how his new record came about but writing and recording In the Fade Molina's first under his own name in four years did provide occasion to look back in time through his lengthy musical history while also blazing a new path forward. In early 2020 embarking on recording a new album he started taking inventory in a way he hadn't really done before delving deep into his personal archives for songs that might fit alongside the new material he'd been writing and demoing. Many of the ostensibly mature musical elements that some listeners have latched on to in his recent work - piano Mellotron the occasional English accent - actually date back well over a decade to Ovens the criminally underrated band with whom Molina wrote and recorded five albums in the early to mid-2000s. In the Fade revisits a few songs from those days. I had a bunch of old stuff that I had tried recording in the Ovens days [as well as] some songs that only got to the demo stage back then and I kind of forgot about he says. There were several gems to be found in there and they helped set him off on the path to making a record that's arguably his best yet. Molina likens In the Fade to a compilation encompassing every phase of his recording career to date while also fitting together as a tight endlessly listenable album. The main thing I was trying to tie everything together with was just really good melodies for the entire record all the way through he says. Every song I wanted to have a really solid hook because there are different styles. These hooks permeate the record's heavier guitar-pop tunes as well as it's more delicate folk-rock and indie-pop tracks. As he describes it In the Fade is a very pop album. It's a return in part to the Ovens sound but also features elements of his more recent material and introduces some intriguing new wrinkles. The record has an audible effortless-sounding ease and coherence to it. This is remarkable given not only the album's musical range but also the time span over which it was written and recorded. Sessions began in March 2020 days before things began to shut down due to Covid and occurred on and off over a long stretch of time. Every time cases died down a bit longtime friend and recording whiz Jasper Leach would book a flight into town and they'd hit the studio. Recording took place with Bay Area recording engineers Jack Shirley and Bart Thurber both of whom Molina has worked with for years now at their respective studios. Sessions were productive but the fluctuating nature of the pandemic meant some of them occurred as much as a year apart. The long gaps between sessions sometimes prompted Molina to wonder if they would ever get to finish what they started. He recalls one particular trip to the studio on an empty BART train (an exceedingly rare sight in the pre-pandemic Bay Area) that made him wonder whether he was supposed to be doing what he was doing. They were thankfully able to complete the record and they also achieved one of Molina's chief aims entering the process: having fun with friends in the studio. That sense of fun is something you can hear throughout and he's delighted about his friends' many contributions to the record. Sarah Rose Janko of Oakland band Dawn Riding who's also Molina's bandmate in The Lost Days provides added vocal harmonies (a first on a Molina solo record) to a number of songs. Leach's contributions are all over the record perhaps most notably on I Don't Like That He. Molina describes it as the most indie pop-sounding song on the record and a tribute to Chicago New York by Bay Area indie-pop legends The Aislers Set. I was just doing these really simple acoustic guitar parts and Jasper laid down this really solid drum take and he added piano and organ to it and it just filled the whole song... he added those solos he did the harmony on a 12-string and then he doubled the harmony on a piano. The album evokes the sounds of some of his favorite bands: Fastbacks The Flaming Lips The Muffs. The simple yet ornate Burn Everyone which evokes Teenage Fanclub's Norman Blake at his wistful best is one of a few songs for which he cites listening to a ton of Belle and Sebastian at the time. Another one of these is Not Worth Knowing where
