The Black Sabbath Covers (7")

Side A contains two Black Sabbath cover songs recorded in the Midwest in the late 90's. Side B is a gorgeous etching of a black ram by artist Will Schaff.

When Jason Molina took on another artist's song, he willed his own universe into it, his own personal and artistic mythology. Be it Conway Twitty or Townes Van Zandt, their blues were infused with Molina's own entrancing blues. This pair of newly discovered, home-recorded Black Sabbath covers is no different.

Molina, a through-and-through fan of metal (seek out his high school metal band the Spineriders' album if you haven't yet) peels back the sinister and stoned elements of Sabbath, zeroing in on the loneliness and brooding. He takes Solitude, from 1971's Master of Reality - and one of Sabbath's more mystical, near-proggy songs - and doubles down on the title. Molina extracts Ozzy Osbourne's gorgeously cooed vocal performance and transforms it into a high and lonesome sound, a desert campfire howler. And on his cover of Snowblind, from 1972's Vol. 4, it becomes obvious what a guitar hero Sabbath's Tony Iommi was for Molina. Molina seemed to pull from Iommi's odd, simple fingerings and tunings throughout his catalogue: from his first album (known informally as "the black album") to Magnolia Electric Co.'s Josephine. Molina's brief acoustic cover dials back the bombast, but you can surely connect Snowblind's chord progressions with Molina's own on the black album and Axxess & Ace.