Damien Jurado
On My Way To Absence
Release Date: Apr 5, 2005
Genre(s): Indie, Rock, Singer-Songwriter
Record label: Secretly Canadian
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Album Review: On My Way To Absence by Damien Jurado
Excellent, Based on 2 Critics
Based on rating 8/10
On My Way to Absence continues on the similar delicate path that Jurado paved starting with Where Shall You Take Me?, with subtle differences. Jurado seems to broaden his palette with which to express this dark business of life on On My Way to Absence -- lush strings swirl underneath tracks like "White Center" and "Night Out for the Downer," while the use of minimal electronics, keyboards, and samples creeps up on tracks like "Big Decision" and "A Jealous Heart Is a Heavy Heart. " All of this is sequenced next to the stripped-down and melancholy rock tracks that Jurado is known for, the dark confessional "Fuel" and the raw "I Am the Mountain" being the best examples.
Opinion: Fairly Good
In “Medication,” the first song on what is still the best of Damien Jurado’s full-length albums (2000’s Ghost of David), the Seattle musician writes from the perspective of a man caught between an affair with the wife of a policeman and an untenable obligation to his delusional, bedridden brother. “It just so happens I have many concerns,” Jurado sings in his spare, lonesome way. It’s a small line, but an elegant one, and that note of understatement you hear in it – the strain to contain things that are not easily endured – is audible throughout his recorded history (five full-lengths and a batch of satellite releases, all of them differing in style and form).
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