Damien Jurado: In The Shape Of A Storm

When Damien Jurado plays solo sets, he sits hunched over his acoustic guitar, the curve of his spine enclosing his body in a cave-like perimeter of internal focus. Watching him feels a bit like interloping on a solitary act of worship or the working-out of a nascent creative idea—a whole crowd invading one man’s privacy. The quiet spectacle aches vulnerability, abstaining from the machismo with which many male singer-songwriter-guitarists perform their work.
In recent years, Jurado’s music wandered away from this lone-troubadour aesthetic, particularly on a trio of adventurous collaborations with the late musician/producer Richard Swift. From 2012’s Maraqopa through 2016’s Visions of Us on the Land, Jurado’s albums followed an unnamed protagonist on an extended vision quest that involved sci-fi speculation, meandering hallucination, and copious religious allusions. As a whole, the project intrigued more than it explained, but its themes inspired Swift to build psychedelic cathedrals of sound to house Jurado’s eclectic, searching lyrics. Blinkering synths, propulsive percussion, and reverb-washed guitar often submerged Jurado’s voice, dispatching the listener to soundscapes suitable for pleasant dreams or nightmarish trips depending on where one dropped the needle.
Jurado’s latest album, In the Shape of a Storm, finds the singer home from his cosmic quest and once again inhabiting a cave-like zone of introspection. The songs are built from raw materials: just Jurado’s voice, his acoustic guitar, and occasional accompaniment from Josh Gordon’s high-strung guitar, which adds ethereal sparkle to the album’s last four songs. Given the conceptual and sonic maximalism of Jurado’s recent work, In the Shape is a low-key flex demonstrating the artist’s multipurpose strength. Many of these songs arrive as rescues and strays—compositions Jurado wrote long ago but never formally recorded. That impulse to collect disparate ideas for posterity could portend an opportunistic, disorganized, or just plain lazy compilation project. Yet Jurado possesses a gift for elevated simplicity, and this quality graces In the Shape of a Storm and gives its ten songs a pleasingly rounded shape.