Like his fellow chameleon Richard Buckner, Damien Jurado moves between pop, rock, folk, lo-fi experiments, and Oldhamesque Americana. Despite those stylistic shifts, Jurado's dolorous tenor and elliptical narratives-- his songs resonate with the verbal economy and hallucinatory clarity of Raymond Carver's short stories-- have been constants. Also like Carver, Jurado has undertaken a dystopian survey of lower-middle-class American life. His heartland is populated by divorcees on train platforms, schizophrenic brothers, unhappy lovers trysting in secret, and world-weary teen runaways-- transient souls, out of love, with relationships doomed by untenable circumstances.
On his most recent full-length, Where Shall You Take Me, Jurado's lyrics remained on point, but he traded in his emoting for a more measured, meandering style that seemed rather flat. If his recent Just in Time for Something EP presaged a partial return to form, On My Way to Absence cements it: Jurado is back to doing what he does best-- pairing simple, sprightly arrangements with mobile vocal melodies. One of those singers who can make bitterness sounds sweet, he cops a coarser, more forceful vocal turn than usual on the emblematic "Lion Tamer", a dreamy haze of piano, guitar, and resentment masquerading as apathy: "You are nothing to me now."
While Jurado's lyrics have shed a bit of their specificity and retreated into a vaguer, more archetypal lovelorn stance, On My Way to Absence's melodies and arrangements are some of the catchiest, most translucently beautiful we've heard from him since Ghost of David. On album opener "White Center", Jurado adopts a mealy mouthed slur that makes it difficult to make out much of the content, but its easy gentility trumps its inscrutability.
"Lottery", slicked with honeyed hums, recalls Where Will You Take Me's elegiac "Matinee". The velvety harmonies and quivering strings of "Big Decision" usher in a more hopeful sentiment: "Got a lot of problems, think I'll work it out." "Simple Hello" is the sort of spare, smoldering rock that Jason Molina might have cooked up in his Songs:Ohia guise, and the poppy folk-rock of "Sucker" is a throwback to Jurado's Rehearsals for Departure.
This is another fine entry in a varied yet consistent career, and while it isn't Jurado's most daring work, it is among his most immediately engaging. The characters are blurrier at the edges, less strikingly defined, but the melodies are bold and vivid. All things equal, a story's told and it's done, but a melody is a book that never stops writing itself. It's melody that brings us back to a song over and over, and it's melody-- rich, fragrant and utterly human-- that Jurado leaves hanging copiously in his wake on his way to absence.
