Fading Trails

Jason Molina sings and writes achingly sad songs that echo from the same high-lonesome caverns where other unadorned highway-rockers have lingered, but with a literacy that suggests a Ph.D. in English rather than a trucker's license. Molina's reedy voice emotes over arrangements that are simple but not necessarily spare: layers of piano, guitars, and Mark Rice's reliable drumming undergird the directness of these paeans to lost love, the open road, and conversations with the devil.