Album: Magnolia Collective - An Old Darkness Falls

For a band whose Indy Southern rock accent has filled stage rooms like smoke over the Appalachians for the past five+ years, Magnolia Collective's new album An Old Darkness Falls, out on Potluck October 24th, is markedly Americana. Half-half stompers to ballads, the common prose is Magnolia Collective's talent for telling it like it is. No tears on this album, just confessions in the dead of night after every attempt to avoid breakdown and breakup has passed. The acoustic guitars get this part right every time and Rich McLaughlin, famous for ripping stages in half with his electric guitar, brings a darker melancholy to bear with the strummed strings this time around.

On An Old Darkness Falls, Magnolia Collective displays a higher understanding of the human condition. That is, there are things in life you can change for the better, and then there are things you write songs about. The grand tradition of Americana is to be painfully honest with the latter and these songs tell their story with a right hand in the air. Murder ballads and lost lovers are just primer topics for this album. The real tell-all's are the desperate missed chances romanticized in "Coldest Winter" and "The Doldrums". Magnolia Collective has always made heartbreak look pretty, these ten songs drift like swans upon a lake.

Magnolia will release An Old Darkness Falls Saturday, October 24th with a performance at Local 506 in Chapel Hill, NC. Nathan Golub and Maldora share the bill. --Carrboro Ninja