If so, he hasn't put it down in song, and his latest album's aura of defeat makes you wonder if it's really starting to get to him. While Jurado's records often alternate between vanishing ballads and melancholy pop-rockers, Shadow revolves entirely around the former-- the songs are unstintingly slow, delicate, and sparse to the brink of abstraction. Jurado and his band festoon wide blank spaces with little scraps of finger-picked guitar, humming keys, and swelling strings, all seeming immersed within a great silence. As such, the album requires several listens before it resolves into something deeper than a pleasant background.

Once you can hear them, the details are often captivating-- how "Denton, TX" brightens from a dim dirge to a sparkly shuffle with a flicker of piano, the dramatic efficacy of the title track's stormy cymbal washes, and the lean ripple that "There Goes Your Man" achieves despite its meager palette. Jurado can be a subtle lyricist-- the Decemberists-esque tragic love story "I Had No Intentions" is particularly well-turned-- but he ventures into romance novel territory too, with all of the sappy sentimentality (see pictures of babies and wedding days on "I am Still Here") and no redeeming penetration of moist grottoes. This penchant for cliché isn't the scope of who he is (this is a guy who wrote a really pretty song about asking God to kill his schizophrenic brother), but it's an undeniable part of him. At least, unlike so many other sad-sack singers, Jurado's weary resignation undersells the overstated lyrics-- he sounds like he's genuinely too sad to get worked up about them.

Damien Jurado And Now That I'm in Your Shadow mp3 lyrics