Review Summary: Fiction as it's written / the bleeding ink on paper
What’s New, Tomboy? runs 30 minutes long—it wastes no time, and pulls no punches. Damien Jurado is 47 years old and 15 albums deep into his career—he has already humbly received the appropriate accolades for his timeless approach to story-driven song-crafting. Jurado has already penned his defining album with his psychedelic
Visions of Us on the Land in 2016. His records since then have then successfully pulled away all the decorative production choices to leave Jurado alone with his songs—culminating in spectacular fashion with the extremely bare
In the Shape of a Storm, an album that reportedly only took 2 hours to record. Having presented his music in every possible extreme, Jurado has nothing left to prove: in 2020, he is just a very good songwriter with no expectations to hold him down.
The third-person narratives that
What’s New, Tomboy? espouses recall the record’s artwork: tableaus in a 1940s Washington home viewed at night from the comfort of the hedges. There is a voyeuristic nature to Jurado’s writing—he is able to assign such precision to his characters and stories that you can’t help but feel like you are being given a glimpse into a situation that you have no right to observe. Jurado mourns the passing of his late producer Richard Swift in ‘Ochoa’ in delicate fashion, but his unadorned delivery allows the song to exist as a universal, grief-stricken sigh: “
far from me but not for long”. Jurado examines grief and impermanence throughout the album with his vulnerable, understated delivery in a way that, in his own words on ‘Arthur Aware’, “
seems obscene and, by all accounts, intrusive.” The curious thing about
What’s New, Tomboy’s appraisal of the mundane human condition is that it invites the listener to participate in Jurado’s own exploration: he muses on ‘Fool Maria’, “
we are fiction as it’s written / the bleeding ink on paper / quiet as an aeroplane before it hits a mountain / we are song / we are gone”.
Jurado himself embodies both “
we are song” and “
we are gone” with aplomb too: there are 4 tunes on
What’s New, Tomboy? that exceed four minutes in length—there is no wasted time. Clever chord progressions and melodies buoy arrangements that are only a couple notches more complex than the complete bare-bones approach that Jurado employed on
In the Shape of a Storm. There are hushed full band arrangements throughout
What’s New, Tomboy?, but the most dominant sounds are Jurado’s cool, gravelly voice and—curiously—the bass guitar of Josh Gordon. Jurado has covered a lot of sonic territory in the past, but it’s still genuinely a pleasure hearing Gordon’s performance add a playful and cheeky nature to the proceedings with his melodically adventurous muted bass lines. Opener ‘Birds Tricked into the Trees’ is itself a minimal, hushed full-band track, but it is the most aggressive on the record—most of
What’s New, Tomboy? plays like a blanket has been thrown over the whole album. For a creature of Jurado’s plume, there isn’t a need to further decorate the songs: Jurado’s songs are somehow perfect just as they are.
