Sad songs may very well say so much, but what about morose-to-the-point-of-near-total-blackout songs? Or contemplating-suicide-except-both-hands-are-currently-occupied-with-this-here-guitar songs? What do they say? In the case of Seattle-based indie-pop purveyor Damien Jurado — who has essentially spent an entire career fashioning fictional depressive episodes from the detritus left in the wake of Springsteen's Nebraska and Elliott Smith's XO (generational bad-mood-rising signifiers if ever there were some), with a slightly spiritual twist — his ever-changing moods have established without question that his God is indeed a Righteously Angry God, one unafraid of visiting locust swarms, emotional funnel clouds and economic ruin upon the downtrodden, woebegone but nevertheless guilty masses struggling with the temptation of Original Sin while still trying to make the rent each month. With this sort of legacy, it'd be easy to think that every Jurado album serves as another stone in the pathway to a Ragged Glory salvation or an Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere purgatory, but that's where you'd be wrong: on his ninth album, two surprises await long-time Juradites, both of them very welcome developments. The first is that Jurado now imagines himself as a band, with long-time contributors Eric Fisher and Jenna Conrad doing the best they… read more »