DAMIEN JURADO - On My Way To Absence

The ever-expanding constellation of songwriters who in recent years have reclaimed, with sensitivity, care and an innovative spirit, the roots of the American singer-songwriter tradition has undeniably produced a vast body of work concentrated within a narrow span of time. Damien Jurado doesn't entirely escape this general trend either: with "On My Way To Absence" he arrives at his sixth album in a career spent far from the spotlight, pursuing a fundamentally "classic" approach to songwriting that, while taking on different musical guises over the years, has always been marked by an authentic quality, a direct expression of the stirrings of his restless, introverted soul.

Across his albums, Jurado has alternately explored multifaceted sonic territories, ranging from the pop of "Waters Ave S" to the ambient experiments of "The Ghost Of David", yet all of them are marked by a lyrical, romantic style of writing, clearly influenced by Nick Drake, and above all by a rediscovery of the folk-rock side of the American song. In this sense, Jurado's artistic arc seems very close, though not symmetrical, to that of another of the best American songwriters of the last decade, namely Jason Molina — who likewise was able to reinterpret the folk-blues tradition through substantial digressions on the theme — even if the artistic paths followed by the two now seem rather divergent.

"On My Way To Absence" follows, a year and a half later, "Where Shall You Take Me?" and sits right along the path traced by the previous album, compared to which Jurado's intimate vein seems not only heightened but by now definitively settled into a lean, essential style, in a secluded, vaguely isolationist dimension close to the one embodied by Mark Kozelek in the days of Red House Painters. Indeed, it's hard not to think of Kozelek's limpid, aching electro-acoustic ballads while listening to "Lottery" or "Big Decision", tracks in which Jurado's interpretive skills also shine at their best, his quiet suffering glimpsed through singing that is at once light and deep, engaged and detached. These two songs follow the opening "White Center" — a ballad that alternates minimal moments with romantic, almost orchestral openings — and together with it form a gentle triptych of tempered tones, which seems like the prelude to a minimal, intimate album, produced in near-total isolation, as had already happened with the Ep "Just In Time For Something" (in which, however, he had perhaps overdone the lo-fi bedroom aesthetic), released at the end of last year. That impression, confirmed by the ballads "Fuel" and "I Am The Mountain", is nonetheless contradicted by the electric eruption of tracks like the harsh, oblique "Icicle" and "Sucker", whose rhythmic drive and alternation between romantic and anguished vocals can't help but recall Songs: Ohia's masterpiece, "The Lioness". References to Molina's work can be found elsewhere on the album too, but without any apparent lapse into sterile homage, rather with a decisive revitalizing spirit: this is the case with the electric ballads "Lion Tamer", "Simple Hello" and "I Am The Mountain", without a doubt the track most overtly inspired by the folk-blues tradition, reinterpreted however with a thoroughly personal sensibility and ultimately far more convincing than Magnolia Electric Co.'s recent output.

Jurado's skill shows in this work above all in his ability to express his own introversion through a series of spare electro-acoustic ballads, in which the musical approach shifts in a continuous alternation of rhythms and cadences, helped also by an instrumental palette — surprisingly varied for an album conceived in a home setting — that even includes the horns lending drama to the ending of "Icicle" and the strings of "Night Out For The Downer". And it's precisely an unconventional interweaving of instruments (violin and piano set against a synthetic beat) that gives rise to the splendid "A Jealous Heart Is A Heavy Heart", a moving emotional gem, on its own enough to justify buying the album, with its romantic, heartfelt and at the same time hypnotic account of the turmoil of a heart thrown into chaos by jealousy, evocative not so much of a mannered teenage torment as of a mature and genuine feeling, which melts, thick with tenderness and rage, into the repeated final invocation "grow old with me".

Sure, Jurado doesn't have the bizarre indolence of Devendra Banhart or the folk-biblical emphasis of Sufjan Stevens, nor is he able to flaunt the blues despair and spleen of Jason Molina or convey the crooner charm of Jens Lekman; and yet, listen after listen, the shadowy figure of a sincere, versatile artist emerges with clarity from "On My Way To Absence", capable of writing that, without excess, naturally warms the heart and conveys genuine emotion.

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27/11/2023