Damien Jurado, Caught In The Trees

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 can to pin skin and depth to Jurado's acoustic bones (the lead cut, “Gillian Was a Horse,” is practically a radio single — complete with jaunty honky-tonk piano and joyously tossed-off lines like “he's no bullshit talker” — when compared to Jurado's "There Is None Blacker" back catalog). The second is that Jurado's bloody-minded fixation on emotional “authenticity” appears to have given way to his better storytelling impulses — in other words, his music may remain decidedly minor-key, but his lyrical scrolls have become more Thomas McGuane (think: The Bushwacked Piano) than Raymond Carver. There are still moments when I expect Elliott Smith's wounded voice to come peeking around any given corner — “Caskets,” “Sorry Is For You” and “Paper Kite” all share Smith's tendency to set up a throat-grabbing line early on, then stick the ice-cold shiv in when you're least expecting it — but in the main, what we hear with Caught In the Trees is the musical answer to the question “What Would Jurado Do?” Which is to say: continue down an idiosyncratic path of making his own music, his own way, while the rest of the world catches up with him one slightly-less-sad song at a time.