Damien Jurado
Now That I'm In Your Shadow
[Secretly Canadian : 2006]

Now closing in on ten years and nearly as many albums into his quietly impressive career, Damien Jurado has cast aside such diversions as field recordings and electrified rock, concentrating on his core strength: exquisitely worded stories embellished with modest arrangements of acoustic guitar, strings and keyboards.  That means And Now That I'm In Your Shadow is well worth hearing, but requires concentration and, perhaps, a decent set of headphones.  It's a record that stuns not with volume but with a murmur.  For instance, abyss-gazing "I Had No Intentions," one man's story of his brother's murder, never rises much above a whisper nor is it orchestrated beyond a few guitar chords and piano runs.  Still the words leave their mark, quietly, matter-of-factly, "I held his hand until the ambulance came/Onto a stretcher they took him away/I followed close in the car behind/The lights and the sirens both dull in mind/November 9."  The song is so bare and unornamented that seems to exist outside time signature, moved forward only by the dreadful events it describes.  Yet it flourishes, briefly, beautifully, in the instrumental piece that follows, as lavish with strings and piano as the main cut is bare.  The title cut is just as good, whispered confidences ("I lost all feeling") against the subtle throb of cello, the drama-heavy clash of cymbal, and "Shannon Rhodes"'s starkness is leavened by a high lonely croon that might remind you of Joshua Tree-era U2.  The final track, "Monsanto," is denser and more echoey than anything else on the album; for once it sounds like Jurado is recording an album, rather than speaking to you, personally, about a person he knows.  It's lovely, mysterious and slow, laced with overtones and tinged with loneliness, perhaps an elegy for all the lost people whose stories Jurado has just told.