by Max Kaplan (@kapslock3)
Tony Molina writes songs that could be scrawled on the slip a fortune cookie’s fortune. Not because they’re filled with aimless aphorisms and bald premonitions, but because they’re really fucking short. Molina’s longest track on his latest compilation, Songs From San Mateo County, peaks out at 1:59. Other tracks don 0:15, 0:29, 1:17 runtimes, making Guided By Voices tracks look like long-winded marathons.
Molina himself never appears on his front record sleeves, but a quick visit to his Bandcamp page shows the sort of unassuming figure you’d expect. He wears rectangular glasses, a denim jacket, his hair cropped tight, and a t-shirt of some hardcore band or another. He looks like a nice guy. Maybe even one you’d maybe find behind the desk of your local record store, to echo the inevitable journalistic portrait of Weezer or Teenage Fanclub or any other power-pop luminaries from the past 30 years. Unlike the guys in those bands, though, Molina shows no pretense for pop glory.
Songs From San Mateo County is labeled as “a collection of unreleased and unfinished material recorded between 2009-2015”. It’s difficult not to see past the irony that Tony Molina has picked up a modest following over the past 5 years by releasing 3 albums that sound comprised of unfinished material (Not one runs over 15 minutes). This isn’t to say that a Tony Molina song itself is unpolished or amateur, it just happens to end sooner than one would expect it to.
A typical Tony Molina track starts by reading like a brief, honed journal entry. Then, you throw in a chugging rhythm section, some riff heroics, and Molina’s heartsick vocals, which do, admittedly, sound like a more phlegmatic Rivers Cuomo. What you get is track after track of power-pop splendor. Each song basically grooves like a TV theme song for a coming-of-age series starring a bedenimed teen lost in a garage riffing frenzy.
If you’re skeptical that Songs From San Mateo County is a collection of scraps and outtakes, you should be, because that’s what it is. Where the cohesiveness of the collection falls short of the lovelorn snottiness of 2014’s Dissed and Dismissed, or the melancholy warmth of 2016’s Confront the Truth, it delivers mostly through the fact that it’s fifteen more minutes of quality Tony Molina shreddery.
Each track bears traces of the time it was recorded, which is mostly before and shortly after Dissed and Dismissed. The verse or two of “Can’t Find My Way” and “Don’t See the Point” sway and ricochet around, before rolling into guitar scales sounding right out of some sludgified version of Street Fighter.
I’ve always found something consoling in the economy of Tony Molina’s lyrics. He confidently shows us that a song doesn’t need to be a grand deliverance of one’s ego, but rather just a momentary slice of clarity. “I’ve gone down that road again, I’ve been there before don’t want you no more. It’s always been hard to find a second time, the more that you change, the more I stay the same. It’s always gonna be that way…” he sings on “Been There Before,” and that’s it, all wrapped up in a fuzzy blanket of guitars.
Above all, Tony Molina makes records that sound like they’re coming from someone who consumes lots and lots of music himself. He’s staked his allegiance to the Beach Boys’ Friends and worn his love for hardcore with a pin on his jacket pocket. It doesn’t take repeat listens to hear his love of Thin Lizzy, Pinkerton-era Weezer, Big Star, Elliott Smith, and The Replacements ingrained in his bite-sized nuggets. So while those groups and songwriters are out of our orbit right now, Tony Molina is out here throwing us 15-minutes of music every couple of years. Listen to it.