The first thing to say about the new Damien Jurado album, Private Hospital, is that it is a book. For reasons environmental and aesthetic, the veteran singer-songwriter has chosen not to release music in traditional physical formats and has instead created a small but perfectly formed book comprising song lyrics and a photo essay (Jurado is an avid collector of ‘found photos’). The music comes in the form of a download code: you get eleven new songs that complete the Reggae Film Star pentalogy which began in 2022, a loosely conceptual cycle that focuses on the world of B-movies, daytime television and the half-anonymous actors and creators who build the worlds we consume.
With those themes in mind, the visual aspects of Private Hospital – its vaguely uncanny photographs of normal people captured in the strangeness of the everyday – begin to seem more important. Similarly, Jurado’s songs often use specific invented detail to give life to otherwise dormant figures, and – at least from the evidence of the few photos that are available online – the combination of song and image is abstract but powerful, creating a sense of wistfulness, melancholy or the uncanny. Songs like Howard Morton go beyond mere character study to create strange atmospheres with vintage synths and choppy percussion. These days Jurado is about more than your average singer-songwriter fayre, but solid tunes and lyrics that range from the confessional to the funny still underpin his work, even when the music is at its most thickly layered.
Since his mid-1990s beginnings, Jurado has been prone to a subtle variety of shape-shifting. Lately, there has been a frazzled West Coast vibe to much of his output – more California than his native Seattle – and that’s still the case, at least in part, although for much of this album, the all-pervading strangeness transcends geography. Some songs, like Pictures on the Run, seem to take musical cues from the Japanese instrumental experiments of the 70s and 80s as much as from Laurel Canyon’s lamplit psychedelia.
Heaven’s a Drag brings found sounds into the equation, and the minimal synths provide an unexpectedly successful foil for his voice, pitched somewhere between low-res classic rock and deadbeat folk. Opener Celia Watson sees him stop just short of a genuine croon, like an American Richard Hawley, before a Beatles-esque volte-face in the middle temporarily takes the song in an unexpected direction. The vocals on Here in the States have the persuasiveness of a televangelist or a cult leader, all widescreen weirdness and aggressive drawl. Hey Pauline is gentler: think Scott Walker if he had teamed up with David Sylvian in the 1980s.
Elsewhere are brief but moving piano vignettes (Vic Tayback, Western Airlines Flight 701), spooked, bloodstained exotica (the deliciously woozy Vampira) and lush, gloopy electronica (the brilliant closer Call Me, Madam, which brings to mind the recent Nicholas Krgovich/Joseph Shabason collabs). It’s all presided over by Jurado’s eye, which is like the eye of a cinematic auteur: calm, controlled, distinctive and poetic. In Private Hospital, he has created an album that begins like a gauzy dream but hits harder the more time you spend with it.