Damien Jurado

Released in April, In the Shape of a Storm was a good record that suffered from the partial misfortune of following a great one. Based on Damien Jurado’s decades of fixation on all things dolorous, leaden, and rainy, from the depressive folk of his early records to his more recent psychedelic period, no one could have predicted 2018’s buoyant The Horizon Just Laughed, a farewell to Jurado’s native Seattle that seemed to awaken something in him, as big life changes can do. It certainly awakened his pretty but sometimes inert songs, imbuing them with lush, bouncy dynamics drawn from vintage R&B and soul. In contrast, Shape was recorded in two hours one afternoon in California. It shows. Even sparser and flatter than Jurado’s early albums, it consists mostly of his acoustic guitar, his high, heavy voice, and his trademark evocations of quiet longing and desperation along rural byways, half novelistic and half poetic. For some fans, it’s a welcome return to form; for others, a tantalizing sketch for another record on par with Horizon. At Motorco, Jurado is joined by another Pacific-Northwest indie vet, Corrina Repp.