I wish I first heard Damien Jurado’s new LP with 16-year-old ears.
There’s a time when music is boundless and joy-inducing and magical, and, for many, that typically coincides with their high school years, when formative experiences swim around you like so many rivers. Reggae Film Star, Jurado’s 18th full-length player and his second on his own label, was built for those years. The record, 12 tracks over far too soon, has an unusual breadth and depth to it, and immensely rewards those who pay it repeated visits. The songs are solid and emotive from stem to stern, and Jurado accompanies them with bravura expressionism – flourishes of strings, trickles of piano, bubbly bass and the occasional drum kit. For those who fell in love with the Jurado of The Monster Who Hated Pennsylvania, his last outing and another rather good one, boy, do we have a record for you.
Jurado wastes little time getting to the meat of the album. The first song, simply “Roger,” is amazingly powerful stuff, with an acoustic guitar shuffle complemented by a suite of saccharine strings that tug at the heartstrings. “Heard you/ Come through my radio/ Sing my truth/ Back to me,” Jurado sings. “Never!/ Never did I walk alone/ Who I was/ Echoing back.” The rest of the lyrics, which set the stage for Roger, aka the film star, give further fuel to the argument that Jurado writes like Raymond Carver with scissors and paste.
Reading Jurado’s lyrics alongside or during a deep listen to Reggae Film Star is deeply rewarding. The cut-and-paste allusion was no accident; Jurado does a lot with very little and often wrings the sentiment right out of expressions and phrases cut from other narratives. In the beautiful “What Happened to the Class of ’65,” where the acoustic guitar is supplemented by spartan percussion and twinkling piano keys, Jurado does an incredible job setting the scene – “I was behind the camera/ I was in the commercial/ Dying fast without consent.” But the lyrics that, oddly, ring true, are quotations from elsewhere. “‘There’s never been a better time for saving,’” he sings, the extra quotations his. “’You’ll be great, I’ll be watching side stage’”. The seemingly random – “‘Caroline, I’ll be sleeping’” or “’Dear Dan, you can wake me anytime I am dreaming’” – is as prescient as the closing bridge, where multi-tracked vocals simply sing, in unison, “I miss you Tacoma.”
Each song is a bit of a wonder to hear. Six songs in, it’s the perky, almost poppy refrains of “Day of the Robot.” Eight songs in, it’s the ambling road song “Taped in Front of a Live Studio Audience.” At nine, it’s “Whatever Happened to Paul Sand,” a folk ballad in the classic, Greenwich Village style. Then, the thing closes with one of its best songs, “Gork Meets the Desert Monster.” “Phillip turns to me and says,/ ‘Is it me or just the part I play?’,” Jurado sings, rather devastatingly but also off-handedly. At 5:17, the record’s longest track by far – most of the fare doesn’t break three minutes each, leaving the listener wanting more – “Gork” has an unusual scope but it plays by the rules of the rest of the LP: acoustic guitar and gentle voice front and center, cut-and-paste lyricism, restrained accompaniment. The cello on the closing song positively weeps over Jurado’s strumming and there are a number of chord progressions that are so good, so sweet, Jurado leaves them naked – no words at all. When he sings a line as seemingly basic, though, as “Early to bed/ early to rise” over a matte painting of soaring guitars, it simply will take your breath away. Imagine what this record could do if I heard it when records were still magical things. Thank you, Damien, for making me feel 16 again. — Justin Vellucci, Spectrum Culture, July 5, 2022
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