After two decades of working with producers and prestige indie labels such as Sub Pop and Secretly Canadian, and, significantly, following the death of his good friend and frequent collaborator Richard Swift, Damien Jurado set up shop as an independently operating entity with the self-produced The Monster Who Hated Pennsylvania, the 2021 debut of his own Maraqopa Records label. Two years later, his third self-released album, Sometimes You Hurt the Ones You Hate, follows a wide-angle formula he established in 2018 with his ...
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After two decades of working with producers and prestige indie labels such as Sub Pop and Secretly Canadian, and, significantly, following the death of his good friend and frequent collaborator Richard Swift, Damien Jurado set up shop as an independently operating entity with the self-produced The Monster Who Hated Pennsylvania, the 2021 debut of his own Maraqopa Records label. Two years later, his third self-released album, Sometimes You Hurt the Ones You Hate, follows a wide-angle formula he established in 2018 with his first self-production, The Horizon Just Laughed (released on Secretly Canadian), his most personal album to that point and one that reflected back on the 1970s and '80s of his childhood. While subsequent releases (all self-produced) were more populated with characters of his own making as well as major and minor celebrities of the era, they continued to dwell in an unbeautified nostalgia for a bygone era filled with vinyl records, ashtrays, and TV antennas. These albums were also all recorded -- some exclusively -- with multi-instrumentalist Josh Gordon. Gordon returns for Sometimes You Hurt the Ones You Hate, one of Jurado's most expansively arranged outings of this fruitful period, with a trio of horn players, a trio of string players, four backing vocalists, and programming and "noise" among the album's credits. It's a compact, eight-song set consisting of track titles like "Neiman Marcus," "Match Game 77," and (soul singer) "Mr. Frank Dell," but he kicks things off with "James Hoskins," a work of psychedelic rock inspired by an employee of a Cincinnati TV station holding his workplace hostage in 1980. (After 90 minutes, the hostages were released unharmed, but Hoskins had murdered his girlfriend earlier that night.) The song opens with an unstable chord and sustained attack of drums before settling into an ominous, racing rock groove powered by a dancing bassline and overdriven, low blurts of noise as Jurado, in typical literary fashion, takes the point of view of the desperado ("They don't play for the common man/Doing his best to swim"). Now that he has our attention, he slows things down for the folkier, strings-embellished "Neiman Marcus" ("Losing his faith in a Neiman Marcus/Feeding his loss in Central time zone"), then strips things back further for the melancholy, intriguingly titled "A Lover, a Balcony Fire, an Empty Orchestra," which finds Jurado backed by a mid-century-style vocal group alongside spacy synths and acoustic guitar. Resurrecting faded ghosts of Lawrence Welk or Ed Sullivan, the vocal group reappears on other tracks, including the more-dedicated retro entry "In a Way Probably Never." To end the album, intimate solo track and album highlight "A Buildings Kind of Building" re-establishes his ability to conjure poignancy and poeticism without bells or whistles before arriving at brighter closer "I Was a Line," which is nevertheless dripping in musical and lyrical nostalgia. At 22 minutes in length, Sometimes You Hurt the Ones You Hate definitely feels like a minor release for Jurado, but it's no less accomplished. ~ Marcy Donelson, Rovi
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Add this copy of Sometimes You Hurt the Ones You Hate to cart. $16.02, new condition, Sold by Salzer's Records rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from ventura, CA, UNITED STATES, published 2023 by Maraqopa Records.
Add this copy of Sometimes You Hurt the Ones You Hate to cart. $26.18, new condition, Sold by Revaluation Books rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Exeter, DEVON, UNITED KINGDOM, published 2023 by Maraqopa Records.
