Damien Jurado & Gathered in Song

Item: I Break Chairs
Author: Chris Estey

I Break Chairs

(2002)

Reviewed by Chris Estey

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Label Sub PopHM Magazine #96July/August 2002

folk rock indie rock rock singer-songwriter

Hey, Damien: What's up? We don't see each other much anymore, because I don't hit your shows as much as I'd like, you're always on tour, and you're busy anyway with your beautiful wife and wonderful kid. Dana Jill tells me you guys are doing well. I'm really glad. Great to see your album selling piles here all over the Pacific NW.

I know we don't have much in common these days. I know I've been a jerk. I'm really sorry about it. I really do respect you, and love your work. I do a whole lot more thinking about you -- you're in almost every stupid freaking indie rock magazine I read, for heaven's sake -- than you probably do about me. But I thought I would take this opportunity to say hello, now that I have to sit down and listen to your voice over and over again, reviewing this album.

You know, when you first started playing slo-core type stuff on my little Fender bass in my apartment at the Josephinum, I was a little worried. I never really liked Rites of Spring, or this emo and "screamo" business you liked so much. I just never cared for the D.C. scene. I had this feeling, later on, when we were in the Flood together (with crazy Kevin) that you were straining out the last bits of hardcore in your system. You seemed to take your solo acoustic playing so seriously. I knew you were going to do it maybe Billy Bragg style for awhile, just a boy and his six string. But our quickie band was some of the most fun I ever had. I knew you had some sort of other agenda on your mind. I just didn't realize how quiet it would be for awhile.

Not that quiet is bad. I mean, you know me, I listen to the same morose, mordant stuff you often do. I enjoyed it when you'd slow things down and stew in your own depressed juices, as on your second album, Rehearsals For Departure. There was something clunky, maybe a bit contrived about this bumpkin persona (the Damien I knew loved Black Flag and hanging out in the city with me), but you sort of created a final masterpiece out of it with your last album, Ghost of David. It was like Sammy Walker channeling Phil Ochs, his beloved mentor, in a graveyard of French surrealists, moaning out this roiling, terrified spirit. It was kinda like your version of John Cale's Music for a New Society -- for one album, I could hear the songs you might have done if you hadn't converted at the moment of your teenage suicide attempt, and not gone through with the suicide either, but lived in a halfway house somewhere in Greenwood, fiddling with a four track.

Now, what's up with this new wave? No, man, I knew you had a great, regular rock album in you. Your spirit is too playful, your talent for capturing people's attentions too wide, your need to tell interesting stories in a variety of different musical contexts too great. These are probably still the haunted personae of your previous albums, but here they shuffle around a bit with more optimism, and sometimes an even scarier, more denying level of despair, because their situations are happening in the daylight. No, I don't understand most of the stories yet -- but any album with hooks such as a mid-section compromised of the splendid one-two punch of the kinda Replacements-ish "Big Deal" and "The Way You Look" cannot be denied. This may indeed be your break out album, if the marketplace has any taste.

So what's next? A little Jon Spencer style blues skronk? Maybe even the noisecore band you wanted The Flood to be? I think your audience has a right to know that you're a chameleon -- but in that classic, David Bowie, Elvis Costello kind of way. And that the songs are always worth savoring, no matter what the flavor the time around.

Editors' ratings - Doug 3.5/5, Jason 3/5