Damien Jurado - In the Shape of a Storm

  by Malcolm Carter

published: 13 / 6 / 2019

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Review

For his fourteenth studio album Damien Jurado goes back to basics. Just an acoustic and his voice. Not only is ‘In the Shape of a Storm’ Jurado’s most intimate, stripped back set of songs in many a year, but it’s also one of his most powerful. Maybe the opening song, ‘Lincoln’, gives early indication of the intimacy spread across these ten songs. “There is nothing to hide,” he sings in a voice that, at times, sounds so fragile it feels like it’s going to crack at any moment. Stripped back and sparse, ‘In the Shape of a Storm’ at times feels like the album Jurado had to make after his longtime producer Richard Swift passed away in 2018. In Swift it appeared that Jurado had finally found the collaborator he was searching for to bring his then musical vision to life. After five albums with Swift at the helm, Jurado’s last album, ‘The Horizon Just Laughed, ’ at times showed signs that Jurado was ready to travel similar roads that we saw him take on early recordings like ‘Rehearsals for Departure’. ‘In the Shape of the Storm’ finds Jurado fully embracing that journey. Apparently the album was recorded over the course of just two hours with just occasional input from Josh Gordon on guitar. Discovering ‘Lincoln’ on an old cassette tape prompted Jurado to collect songs that he had written but never released because they didn’t feel at home on any album up until now. The songs are quite short; the longest song here only clocks in at just over four minutes, the shortest, ‘Oh Weather’ is over in just over a minute, a longing love song that needs not a second longer to get its message across. ‘South’ finds Jurado on a hillside as a child planning the future with a friend, while ‘Throw Me Now Your Arms’ is another touching love song, Jurado’s fragile tones once again highlighting the intimacy of the lyrics; at times it feels like we are intruding on some of Jurado’s personal conversations. ‘Where You Want Me To Be’ is another longing love song, although it’s a little more up-tempo than others on the album (it could almost be a radio-friendly pop song in other hands), and, shorn of the fragility that informs many of the songs on ‘In the Shape of a Storm’, it’s still a believable and honest performance from the singer. ‘Silver Ball’ finds Jurado back in delicate mode. “Time does not heal” states the singer, while what must be Josh Gordon’s guitar lends a ghostly, almost unsettling atmosphere. “Strange as it seems, I have known you before/But it was not our time yet,” sings Jurado on the title track and this could be applied to the selection of songs he’s chosen for this album; they’ve finally found their home at last. Yet to make an album that is anything less than interesting, by looking back it seems that Jurado has created an album of his most affecting, personal and powerful songs with ‘In the Shape of a Storm’, and one that will certainly be appreciated by fans that have stayed with the singer-songwriter since his early days. It might well be Jurado at his most raw, but it’s all the more affecting for that.

Track Listing:-

1 Lincoln
2 Newspaper Gown
3 Oh Weather
4 South
5 Throw Me Now Your Arms
6 Where You Want Me to Be
7 Silver Ball
8 The Shape of a Storm
9 Anchors
10 Hands on the Table

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