Send "Damien Jurado " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Allmusic |
 Recorded over the course of a week with only the help of producer/musician Richard Swift, Damien Jurado's 2010 album finds the singer/songwriter aiming all the more clearly for the stately, somewhere between the Band at its most formal and the later Flaming Lips at their most controlled. Starting with the keyboards and handclaps of "Cloudy Shoes," Saint Bartlett plays with any number of elements of rock and pop history -- not for nothing does a classic Phil Spector drumbeat appear on "Arkansas" -- but ultimately there's a sense of solitude in vast spaces (and especially vast American spaces) that dominates. At its most gently beatific, on numbers like the serene guitar-and-bells blend of "Rachel & Cali" and the steady piano-and-keyboard blend of "The Falling Snow," it seems like all will be well, even though the songs suggest darker shades in the music alone. Lyrically, Jurado's portraits of questioning souls and contemplation perhaps never get so intense as with the combination of yearning singing, acoustic guitar, and distant sonic sludge and disturbance on "Kansas City" (though "Kalama," in its tale of a dying soul speaking to his mother wondering about what happens next, comes close). Blasts of feedback and other dissonant elements crop up at points, but otherwise this is an album of focused calm in both singing and playing, a vision of concern and empathy amid unease....full text |
| Bbc |
| With his 2008 effort, Caught in the Trees, Seattle singer/songwriter Damien Jurado truly expanded his craft. It became epic, dusted with bold musical statements. It was as much about the largeness of his emotional content as it was about the blistering folk-rock that accompanied it, but with Saint Bartlett Jurado has expanded in a different way. Here, instead of grand statements, he whispers to make himself heard. The textures may feature sweet organs and other augmentations, but they are thinner, subtler and more reliant on that strong emotional content that he has made his own. Saint Bartlett begins on a much quirkier note, though, with a discernible Motown influence running through the first couple of tracks at least. Cloudy Shoes is irresistibly lazy in tempo and makes no fanfare of its super keyboard string arrangement – the whole thing is effortless and dashed off with wonderful ease. Absent-minded call and response vocals add to the drift, completing the woozy atmosphere. Similarly, the almost honky-tonk piano of Arkansas is another stylistic affectation that, given this relaxed treatment, becomes a joy to experience. Crucially, though, that emotional stuff is on hand to rear its head to balance the record, and balance it deftly does. Jurado’s voice, capable of great power, is reduced to an absolute whimper on Wallingford, a breezy but ultimately doomy exertion of quiet power. Perhaps the moment of highest tension comes on yet another gloriously laid-back strum – Kalama contains several pearls of unfussy pleas, apparently to Jurado’s mother, the most noteworthy being, “Mother, will you keep me as ashes on the mantle, or thrown out?” A man that asks his own mother such a question needs to do so with caution – Jurado proves a safe pair of hands....full text |
| Dustedmagazine |
| An unexpectedly lush set of tunes from a determined minimalist, this ninth full-length by Damien Jurado paints delicately the indeterminate outlines of remembered love, broken connections and imagined release. Recorded more or less in isolation at producer Richard Swift’s Oregon studio, the album nonetheless is well populated, teeming in its understated way with translucent textures of strings, piano, acoustic and electric guitar, and scratchy found sounds. It suggests and evokes rather than delineates. From transcendental “Cloudy Shoes” on down, you are not always sure what is happening in a song, only that it is freighted with rumination, rue and fond remembrance. One gets the sense that the narrative – in story-ish songs like “Rachel and Cali” or album-stopping “Kansas City” – continues in the pauses, that what Jurado tells you is only a scrap or two of what he’s seeing, thinking, recalling. The disc begins with “Cloudy Shoes,” dense and dramatic with Spectorish, wall-of-sound strings. Jurado’s worn voice sounds more vulnerable than ever within this glossy arrangement, tremulous and cracking slightly. His voice doubled, intercutting with itself, sounds like a rambling internal monologue that gets stuck on certain phrases or images and can’t quite let them go. This combination – of unexpected lavishness in the arrangements and starkly minimal singing – gives Saint Bartlett an eerie luminousness. It’s an aura that extends to its most carefree and rock conventional moments – the piano rolling, tin-pot tapping “Arkansas,” the electric Neil Young crunch and drone of “Wallingford.”...full text |
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