Damien Jurado – Reggae Film Star

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A cinematic sweep of strings opens Roger, the first song on Damien Jurado’s eighteenth album Reggae Film Star. Normally, calling strings cinematic is lazy music journo talk, but in this case, it needs to be said. Reggae Film Star is an album that owes much of its thematic muscle to the cinema. Here is a group of songs that exist somewhere between dream and celluloid, songs whose images appear as if filtered through the gauze of nostalgia or subtly modified by the gaze of a silent audience. Vintage technology seems capable of harnessing transmissions from another time – the old radio in Roger, for example, becomes a kind of magical artefact capable of bringing hope or sadness.

Jurado has made a very good career out of treading the line between nostalgia and raw emotion. 2020’s What’s New, Tomboy? was a hazy collection of songs about sadness and longing. Reggae Film Star engages with similar ideas but with a more cohesive structure. The poetic voice is sustained throughout, the references to film and television (notably to the American sitcom Alice) hold the piece together, and the result is an album that is itself filmic. Meeting Eddie Smith, which begins in bleak surrealism and twists into a haunted shuffle, blurs the lines between reality and Hollywood fiction. Jurado’s weary delivery and washed-out acoustic guitar are the foundation of his sound, but he’s capable of upping the pace when the song requires it: Roger’s Audition, for example, gets a hefty percussive kick part-way through.

And – as in the elusive and complex lead single, What Happened To The Class Of ‘65? – he’s brilliant at encapsulating the cautious hope that comes with missing someone. Here, as elsewhere, there is a kind of double exposure: real-life overlaid by cinema. And as one bleeds over into the other, you are never quite sure which is which. The effect is disquieting but hugely satisfying. On Location, Undisclosed 1980, the mystery crystallises into something tangible, yet still on the border between the imaginary world and lived experience, as Jurado sings: ‘I could never live a life without you/I could never do another film’, a line which crops up later in The Pain Of No Return. Literary theorists might see something of the postmodern in this technique, a constant play between diegetic and mimetic storytelling perhaps. But it’s probably more helpful to see it as a reflection of the narrator’s mental state, fractured by the weirdness of the silver screen, repaired by love or human kindness.

That fractured state of mind is best observed in Day Of The Robot, a song related almost exclusively in dialogue. We are never quite sure whether the dialogue is a professional one or if it exists only inside the mind of the album’s narrator. Similarly, Ready For My Closeup begins with calm, quotidian details before fading out and returning with a fraught accumulation of words that eventually leads us in the unlikely direction of the Mount St. Helens eruption.

The musical diversity on Reggae Film Star is all the more striking given the album’s conceptual clarity. There is a 70s rock sound – insistent drums and gulping bass – on Taped In Front Of A Live Studio Audience, while Whatever Happened To Paul Sand is like a gloomier Paul Simon. Lois Lambert resembles a lost snippet of some existential Jimmy Webb composition. A couple of songs are augmented by a surprisingly delicate piano. The final song, Gork Meets The Desert Monster, is the rangiest and most complex. It divides itself in two, rather like the narrator, and glides towards a restless, pregnant silence.

Reggae Film Star is not an album that provides easy answers, but despite its cryptic nature, it never feels dense beyond interpretation, and that is thanks to Jurado’s entrancing way with words. You feel he is unspooling a set of clues before your eyes that a new truth might reveal itself at every turn. It’s an addictive listen, full of faded beauty and lit by distant hope.

Reggae Film Star is released on 24 June 2022

Pre-Order via Bandcamp: https://damienjurado.bandcamp.com/album/reggae-film-star