TONY MOLINA 'Confront The Truth' LP

The eight offerings on "Confront the Truth" notch a significant advancement in TONY MOLINA's style and approach. Almost completely absent from these new songs are the overloaded guitar crunch of "Dissed and Dismissed," or his earlier work with Ovens; it's replaced by gentle acoustic balladry, tasteful Mellotron and piano backing, the kind of musicianship that often takes a lifetime to master. The sadness of this music has precedents in pop's past; Tony's revelatory turn into specific traditions of pop music speak directly to the reasons why we love music in general, and what keeps our finest players driven to create. The repertoire from which he draws may be narrow, but in these songs, you hear exactly what Tony found in those influences that shaped his experience; years upon years of focus and isolation in developing his guitar skills to speak to these truths. The main difference here is that where Tony's previous works felt casual and easy to digest, here we feel the full weight of his emotional needs pressed against the gentlest and most careful music of his career.

FFO: Teenage Fanclub + Big Star + The Byrds +++