The upright bass gives a resounding and metronomic thump thump thump onthe new Molasses album. This low-octave punctuation generates a gloomyyet suspended feeling: you might grow anxious in the gray fog thatsurrounds these songs, but you simply cannot escape it or shed thegloom. It lumbers methodically after you while your feet are rooted inplace and you have nowhere to go. But the more you are compelled tolisten in place, the more you notice the glistening sounds of the musicwhich come breaking through the gloom. Scott Chernoff's voice isfamiliar and inviting; it has this habit of laying a heavy croon oraccent on the end of verses and lines, while laying off almostdisinterestedly at the beginning of them. It's not unlike rocking upand down on the waves in a unstable rowing boat which could capsizewith the next swell. Again, the feeling is one of inescapableisolation, but this time some Dramamine might help.Surrounding Chernoff is the requisite (and, at this point, almostcliched) Montreal cooperative of musicians whose memberships in otherbands would be too laborious to enumerate (a sampling of theConstellation and Alien8 labels will give you a representativecross-section). Let it just be known that there is a lush assortment ofpiano, guitars, strings, horns, and organs. "Death March (Erskine'stheme)" lets loose at one point with what rightfully could be called anaural assault of horns, percussion, guitars and banjos. For about twominutes, it sounds as if thirteen New Orleans brass bands weresimultaneously competing on separate street corners of Bourbon Street.My biggest disappointment with Molasses is how similar all the songsare. I enjoy the sound of the first few songs, like "Valley Song" and"Insomnia," and the music along with the lyrics along with thepackaging (we will talk about this shortly) create this lovely gothicenvironment (not gothic in the way you are thinking. I am merelytalking about 18th century spooky houses in rural New England, lit bymoonlight and with wind rustling dead leaves on trees). But soon therepetition of chords, tempos, and vocals give the sensation of beingstuck in a time loop. Listen to one of the song samples and you have afairly good idea how the entire album sounds. The instrumental songscome almost as a relief, for they are the most distinct andexperimental pieces in the two disc set and they remind us we stillgoing forward in time rather than repeating it. Despite the homogenoussound, it is not too much of a chore to listen through two discs sinceMolasses executes a pleasant sound. The packaging of 'A Slow Messe' isbeautifully done without being cumbersome and unwieldy. The dualbooklets feature lyrics as well as Chernoff's photographs, distressedto make them look ancient or unearthed. By the end of listening to thealbum and perusing the inserts, I understood how aptly named the bandis. Chernoff's vocals stretch out with the viscosity of drops ofmolasses, keeping level and understated during the formation of thedrop and rising at the point at which the droplet of molasses gets tooheavy for itself and finally falls away into the dark space below.
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