Damien Jurado - Maraqopa Vinyl Record

Welcome to Maraqopa, population 2. Damien Jurado’s newest collaboration with producer Richard Swift drops us into a brutal and benevolent landscape. The bold strokes and new turns the pair made with 2010’s Saint Bartlett are taken even further. He throws open the gate on his oft insular dirges and allows them do some real wilding out in the canyon. In Maraqopa, the vistas are miles-wide; the action is more dynamic; the close-ups sweaty and snarling. The strummed desert blues that begins “Nothing is the News” quickly bursts open into an Eddie Hazel-worthy supernova shred session, all of it swirling in tinny-psych and Echoplex’d howls. We’ve never heard anything like this from Jurado. Fifteen years into his remarkable career, and he continues to blossom. Jurado and Swift establish themselves not only as inventive, trusting collaborators, but as one another’s spirit animals in American outsider songcraft —lone wolves in black sheep’s clothing. Swift is the Ennio Morricone to Jurado’s Sergio Leone.

• Nothing Is The News
• Life Away From The Garden
• Maraqopa
• This Time Next Year
• Reel To Reel
• Working Titles
• Everyone A Star
• So On, Nevada
• Museum Of Flight
• Mountains Still Asleep