Ghost of David
(Sub Pop)
A tribute to Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, featuring artists like Chrissie Hynde, Ben Harper, Ani DiFranco, Johnny Cash and Hank Williams III will be released in November. The record’s final track will feature Damien Jurado, and despite all the high-profile talent included, it is Jurado who is the most fitting choice for the project. His new album, Ghost of David, is both sonic and spiritual descendant of The Jersey Devil’s stark classic, and like the best parts of Nebraska, it’s pretty damn scary.
“Medication” is the formidable opener. Oscillating between a paranoid-schizophrenic brother and his married (to a cop) lover, the narrator (“Keith”, like Springsteen, Jurado leaves no detail unturned) chills the listener with his eerie detachment. Things don’t get bubbly from there--- as you might suspect from a guy who recently released a CD of bleak found recordings and conversations--- but the stark inner landscape of the troubled modern mind is where Jurado does his best work, so pull up a pile of empty liquor bottles and sit down.
Sonically, Jurado has outfitted Ghost of David to match his last-thread-before snapping lyrical concerns. Think early Palace Brothers or the rusty, unhinged scrape of Souled American. Only “Paxil”, which revs with a hint of 1982 Sonic Youth, breaks into rock territory. The majority of songs, especially the phantasmal title track, “Tonight I Will Retire”, “Johnny Go Riding” and “Ghost in the Snow” reach a kind of cold, mesemrizing standoff with the world: leave me alone and I’ll leave you alone and we’ll both just wait to die.
Ghost of David firmly establishes Jurado as a talented songwriter/storyteller mining a distinctly American vein that is comparable to the fiction of Flannery O’Connor: spooked and hollow souls wearing paths from pacing in their thin, dingy carpets while a bare bulb flickers overhead. And if that kind of milieu sounds invigorating, Ghost of David just might be your record of the year.
Time Out New York, 2000
