Damien Jurado – Saint Bartlett

If you’re fed up of reading music journalism where the writer is either an expert on the subject he’s writing about, or is continually distracting from his vacuous cavern of creativity and ill-formed opinion by filling the article instead with needless details and factoids from press releases and Wikipedia, then Adam Nelson’s review of Secretly Canadian-signed, Seattle-based Damien Jurado’s ninth studio album, the Richard Swift-produced Saint Bartlett, recorded in Swift’s National Freedom studio in Oregon, Jurado’s first since 2008’s Caught in the Trees, might come as a relief.

I’ve got to own up and admit that if you’re reading this review because you’re a Damien Jurado fan, you’re probably already more qualified to talk about Saint Bartlett than I am. The above paragraph basically contains everything I knew about the guy up until a couple of weeks ago, and handily, still lets me fill out my very own vacuous cavern of creativity and ill-formed opinion with needless details and factoids. Jurado’s one of those guys I’ve always approached with the best of intentions of “getting into”, only to find myself cowering away from his huge back catalogue and listening mainly to the few tracks that I feel comfortable with that I’d gathered from various give-away CDs and samplers over the years. Saint Bartlett is his ninth album in thirteen years, a pretty massive effort by most artist’s standards, but he seems to have achieved this quietly and with the minimum of fuss. As described recently to me by a friend, Jurado is the Elliott Smith that didn’t die, which causes problems all of its own: while each of Smith’s records, in retrospect, seems like a punctuation mark to the various stages of his career, Jurado’s feels, to a casual observer at least, like a sentence still in flow. That his ninth album has been widely touted as his breakthrough says a lot about the nature of his perennial outsider nature.

St. Bartlett makes it fairly easy to see why he is loved by the few, unknown by the many. It meanders along without ever really announcing itself, without ever hitting a highlight, and ends with no real fanfare. That all sounds really rather unfair on what is an album that is consistently well-written and crafted, with some really excellent and evocative lyrics – ‘Rachel and Cali’’s “there’s too many people out there I don’t know / It’s not that I’m too shy, I cannot be polite / I just don’t feel confident in crowds” invokes the same sense of crippling social awkwardness that Matt Berninger has built a wildly successful career on – but ultimately it’s all a bit blunt and uneventful, displaying moments of promise and failing to deliver on much of it. Lacking the personal connection, I just feel a little underwhelmed by the Jurado experience, St. Bartlett failed to ignite in me what I’d hoped it might.