:: Track Listing

1. White Center
2. Lottery
3. Big Decision
4. Lion Tamer
5. Fuel
6. Simple Hello
7. Sucker
8. I Am the Mountain
9. Night Out for the Downer
10. Northbound
11. Icicle
12. A Jealous Heart is a Heavy Heart

:: Record Review

Damien Jurado

On My Way to Absence
(Secretly Canadian; 2005)

Rating: 70%
Combined Rating: 66%


My friend swats the bathroom door open and yells at me, “You need to get a hold of yourself.” Hunkered over the communal sink, I look up and into the mirror. I see him glaring at me. “You don’t get it, man,” I say, lurching from the basin and slapping the electric dryer. He walks to the urinal. I start to cry. “I think Damien and I are breaking up,” I tell him.

I tell him about how ideal the past two years have been. How when I first met him he was quiet and adventurous, and I asked him, “Where Shall You Take Me?” and he answered, “Nebraska,” and so I drove him there. I say to my friend, You see, it was a whirlwind kind of deal, he told me about his past affair with a teenage girl, about his childhood, about riding in shit cars and rubbing up America’s torso. It was so romantic, how he spoke slowly and in the bluntest detail. I didn’t mind driving around.

And then we get back and he goes into the studio. That put a strain on things because the whole album was about me and what he told me and our trip together. But, he did set the dark, shuddering tales against wispy folk strumming and predictably nimble, aching vocals, so I let the invasion of privacy slide. You see, in our short time together, I learned about Damien’s back catalog. Although I enjoyed I Break Chairs (2002) and it’s rustic smattering of chunky electric guitars and roots-rock scowling, I hoped for a return to the more vulnerable, harrowed tip-toeing of his beautiful Ghost of David (2000) and Rehearsals for Departure (1999). Where Shall You Take Me was everything I could have hoped for, all gothic folk and delicately emptied rib cages. 2003 was a good year for Damien and me.

Yeesh. So 2004 was pretty mundane until he started working on his new record. The first song that I heard was the beginning of the end: “A Jealous Heart is a Heavy Heart.” Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always taken to Damien’s backwoods experimentation, but when he played the languid electronic beat knocking thinly against a dirge of piano keys and dainty strings, it just sounded forced. I doubted his lyrics, and him, as well: “Damien, the only reason this narrator can be so sympathetic is because he doesn’t have to be jealous anymore.” I chastised him for saying “drownding” (my bourgeois sensibilities got the best of me) and rocked gently to the dissolution of the piano, smiled as the strings restrained from going epic. “Grow old with me,” Damien said.

I heard the complete album a month later. “White Center” was a tease; Damien’s producer buddy Eric Fisher dropping some heavy bass drum under a grassy pop line and interesting pedal work, but never allowing it to go much farther than vague middle America. I liked the sweetly off-time harmony between Damien and Rosie Thomas in “Lottery,” but by the time “Big Decision” rolled up slowly, it became clear that Fisher’s arrangements (that damn E-Bow) and Damien’s Flannery/O’Connor-esque worry had weakened. Sure, the scrawling, high-pitched gospel legatos, diced and wiped from speaker to speaker, offered a new side to the consistently pleasant parity of percussion and Jurado-brand humming, but the whole thing sounded flat and shallow. Then “Lion Tamer” was, like, the same song, only a tad sadder with more snare.

So, he was still writing some fantastic melodies, still knew when to pull back and give blank space its space. And the thicker his guitars got, the more jagged riffs he layered, the more I didn’t so much think “I Break Chairs” as just imagine him buried underneath a crumbling family tomb. “I Am the Mountain” was rollicking and the drums, for once, accentuated Jurado’s sultry drawl, peeking drunkenly in a reverbed cycle, but the song highlighted the biggest disappointment in our relationship: when Damien details the tiniest of moments, his lyrics thrive, cradling the song ever so intimately. When he doesn’t do that, his lyrics blow.

I was bored with the middle of the LP. The trance-like spell of Take Me had been clawed at, scooped out a bit. Yet, Damien still seemed as confident, troubadour, and brooding as ever in any of his six proper full-lengths. “Night Out for the Downer” translated winningly from Just in Time’s reel-to-reel, crowing with a very Warren Ellis violin and more of Thomas’s flawless warble; “Icicle” was fucking tearing me apart within it’s first twenty seconds of staccato bass; and there was just so much I loved about Damien in Absence and so much that disappointed me. It was as if the longing, the jealousy of anything past the yellow of Omaha, that carried us on our trip and through our first two years had been beaten to a science. He wasn’t longing so much as craving.

When I’m done, my friend puts his hand on my shoulder. “But he’ll have another EP soon, don’t worry. Another chance,” he reassures. He’s right, it is too soon to leave my Seattle minstrel. We leave the bathroom to drink more beer. Dom Sinacola :: 6 April 2005 |