another gem

My High Violet love-fest was interrupted Tuesday morning when, in a Klonopin-induced haze, I discovered on eMusic Damien Jurado’s latest (released on May 25), the somber Saint Bartlett. It’s a beautiful album, comprised of twelve mainly acoustic guitar-driven songs (tag: folk rock). Surrounding his guitar are sublime string arrangements ("Cloudy Shoes," "Throwing Your Voice," and the sorrowful "The Falling Snow") and sparse drum and percussion rhythms (although "Arkansas" bumps from the speakers like a long lost Phil Spector tune from the early '60s). Pearly pianos and dependable bass lines don't accompany the songs so much as they console the lost souls wandering throughout Saint Bartlett. Not that these musical elements are unimportant, but they all revolve around Jurado's egg-shell voice. An avalanche of sadness slowly builds in "The Falling Snow," and you expect his voice to crack from the weight, especially when he pleads "Come down from your mountain/You've been gone too long/If you will then you should say so/Don't leave me hanging on/Out from my open window/We could hear you breathing/Hold on but it does not hold on/Every mountain falls" Whether he's channeling Neil Young ("Wallingford") or nakedly confronting mortality and its aftermath in "Kalama" ("Mother is it easy/Knowing that I will die soon/Will you keep me as ashes/placed on the mantel or thrown out?"), Jurado's voice strikes your heart in its subtlety and honesty, which you would expect from a folk-rock musician, but few artists convey their vision as beautifully as Jurado.

If I had to compare this record to another, it would be Cat Power’s You Are Free. Like You Are Free, Saint Bartlett struggles to soar just over our heads, skimming the treetops and street lights. As you watch its beautiful but troubled flight, you’re concerned that its wings won’t be strong enough to reach its destination, but its struggle is a beautiful endeavor, beautiful because the will to survive is glorioius in its incomprehensibility. Some survive. Others die. And some struggle to maintain the balance between those two animations. Jurado, like Cat Power, gives those unfortunate souls a name, a face. And the faces are always dimly lit -- we don’t need to see the color of their eyes or the contours of their cheeks. Why? Because we know these people; we’ve worked with them; we’ve held their hands; we’ve kissed their crusted lips. Saint Bartlett gently forces us to confront those dimly lit faces and illuminate them. Those faces are our own.

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Damien Jurado begins his tour this Saturday in Seattle. He visits The Bishop in Bloomington on June 13.

Free mp3s courtesy of Jurado's label, the magnificently terrific (and Bloomington's own) Secretly Canadian:
"Arkansas" and "Cloudy Shoes"

xx