DAMIEN JURADO - SAINT BARTLETT (LP)

Damien Jurado Saint Bartlett On Vinyl LP

Saint Bartlett opens up with a grandiosity yet unheard on a Damien Jurado album. The album strips away the many layers of paint from the house down the street we know Jurado has occupied for the last decade. The new coat is exhilarating. It makes the whole neighborhood shine. It's a modest grandiosity; still homegrown. The mellotron swells, heavenly handclaps ring in stereo and big drums create a sky for the songs to fly in. And the words. Words spring forth from within the volcano of Jurado, full of hope. There’s so much hope, in fact, that album opener “Cloudy Shoes” turns into a call-and-response with himself, as though it were a dialogue between two halves of himself.

Richard Swift’s Spector-esque production is spot-on. He ferries Jurado across theriver, where the metamorphosis occurs. He then ferries him back, and it is through Swift’s lens that we see Jurado not as a folk singer, but as a mystic somewhere between Van Morrison, Scott Walker and Wayne Coyne. Saint Bartlett was made entirely at Swift’s National Freedom studio in Oregon, in just under a week with only Jurado and Swift as the performers.

Damien Jurado Saint Bartlett Track Listing

1.  Cloudy Shoes
2.  Arkansas
3.  Rachel & Cali
4.  Throwing Your Voice
5.  Wallingford
6.  Pear
7.  Kansas City
8.  Harborview
9.  Kalama
10. The Falling Snow
11. Beacon Hill
12. With Lightning In Your Hands