Damien Jurado's records are like little outposts on a desolate Midwestern highway: overgrown filling stations, dilapidated barns, canted trailers. They have that abandoned and futile quality; rustic and battered by time, they can make us gasp with nostalgia for lives we've never lived. In Jurado's songs-- tunes for falling asleep behind the wheel with a bottle between your thighs and nothing but sky on the horizon-- you can feel his accumulated fatigue.
But if you'd spent your entire musical career trawling the same highway, always stuck between gears, you'd be tired, too. "Lover, I am still here breaking chairs," he sings on "Hoquiam", wallowing, as ever, in romantic stagnancy. Jurado's never quite in love and never quite out; he's always desperate, losing, and not too proud to beg. He's spent the better part of a decade falling for variously unavailable women-- wives, teen runaways, and people who've just moved on. It wouldn't be a Damien Jurado album if there wasn't a sense of endless return: And Now That I'm in Your Shadow finds him wearing his rut a little deeper into the road. "Does your husband know I call you sweetheart?" he asks on "What Were the Chances", going so far as to ask, "Would you change your last name to mine?" Jurado is joined by a new band on this album-- Eric Fisher and Jenna Conrad-- and it's Conrad, whose voice is as lovely and self-effacing as Jurado's, who answers him amid an icy, slow-mo swirl of acoustic guitar, clicky mechanical drums, and forlorn keys: "I think my kids would mind." Has this guy ever gotten a break?
If so, he hasn't put it down in song, and his latest album's aura of defeat makes you wonder if it's really starting to get to him. While Jurado's records often alternate between vanishing ballads and melancholy pop-rockers, Shadow revolves entirely around the former-- the songs are unstintingly slow, delicate, and sparse to the brink of abstraction. Jurado and his band festoon wide blank spaces with little scraps of finger-picked guitar, humming keys, and swelling strings, all seeming immersed within a great silence. As such, the album requires several listens before it resolves into something deeper than a pleasant background.
Once you can hear them, the details are often captivating-- how "Denton, TX" brightens from a dim dirge to a sparkly shuffle with a flicker of piano, the dramatic efficacy of the title track's stormy cymbal washes, and the lean ripple that "There Goes Your Man" achieves despite its meager palette. Jurado can be a subtle lyricist-- the Decemberists-esque tragic love story "I Had No Intentions" is particularly well-turned-- but he ventures into romance novel territory too, with all of the sappy sentimentality (see pictures of babies and wedding days on "I am Still Here") and no redeeming penetration of moist grottoes. This penchant for cliché isn't the scope of who he is (this is a guy who wrote a really pretty song about asking God to kill his schizophrenic brother), but it's an undeniable part of him. At least, unlike so many other sad-sack singers, Jurado's weary resignation undersells the overstated lyrics-- he sounds like he's genuinely too sad to get worked up about them.
