On My Way To Absence

There comes a time in every artists career when he disconnects himself from the public. With 'On My Way To Absence', Damien Jurado has made such a break. He hung up the phone and left it lying on the counter and in the process has created a quintessential Jurado piece of work; a masterpiece by one of today's most incredible voices.

'On My Way To Absence' is full of life and steeped in history. Songs going back pretty deep in the Jurado catalogue resurface and are given their most immediate treatment to date. The album though is stripped of any genre-adopting. This is the sound of Jurado and longtime collaborator Eric Fisher locked in a mental space for four months. This journey inward has resulted in his darkest work to date, what Jurado refers to as "a tribute to jealousy". The sheer emotional audacity is astounding.

Aesthetically it's the broadest album he has produced to date - some songs being crafted from ostensibly simple means, just voice and guitar and maybe a little percussion, others seeped in layers of strings, buried beats and even sonic textures.

In the same manner that Nick Cave, Lucinda Williams and Gillian Welch consistently write songs that sound stoked in the fires of time, Jurado songs sound old because he's captured a particular primal essence in such a way in which he tells stories about people. He finds the quick truth, the good stuff and sings it from his gut. Such is the magic of Damien Jurado.