Damien Jurado is sad. He’s been telling us over the course of eight albums just how down he’s been, and his ninth offering sees him carrying on similarly. So that’s the bad news — it’s another batch of interchangeable folk songs. And that’s also the good news — another batch of folk songs from an elder statesman of the lo-fi scene who has perfected his craft. Caught in the Trees is slow, wandering and powerful. At its most heart-wrenching moments, singing duties are shared with cellist Jenna Conrad. Jurado’s two-octave moan cradles Conrad’s whisper; in exchange, she keeps him from straying too far from the melody. In a slight twist, Jurado plays his rusty guitar with vitality on the opening handful of tracks, and he sounds kinda pissed (“I’m a lie detector, he’s no bullshit talker”); Conrad, too, sounds energized, and you wonder if Jurado set out to make an alt-rock record. But with ‘Last Rights’, a barren lullaby marked by lulls of silence and perpetual exhaustion, he slips into his old ways. The remainder of the album more or less follows suit. At a point in an artist’s career when you can pretty much guess what their album will sound like before hearing it, it’s comforting at first, but before too long it isn’t quite enough.
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