Review: Damien Jurado - Maraqopa
Damien Jurado - Maraqopa (2012, Secretly Canadian)
By Alex
Damien Jurado’s music is great at making you envision long road trips through dense forests and there’s no lack of this feeling on Maraqopa. It’s a pretty sonically ambitious album as it is not as catchy as 2010’s Saint Bartlett. Luckily, Maraqopa makes up for catchiness with a lush, dreamy sound and some of Jurado’s best lyrics. This being said, the album is not free of missteps.
Maraqopa on its own is an intriguing name for an album. Is it a place? Is it someone’s name? A quick Google search yielded no results unrelated to Damien Jurado, although it did try and correct the spelling to Maricopa, which is in fact a county in Arizona. Maybe the album is dedicated to the county’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio? It would make sense if Jurado disagreed with Arizona’s politics, as there are some pretty bitter, angry lyrics on the album. “Working Titles” especially has a few gems. In it, Jurado takes on journalists (he calls them fools) to another musician with the lines “If I’ll show up in a title of your song/I only hope somebody requests it”.
On “Life Away From the Garden” Jurado sounds like he’s singing in a graveyard with a choir of ghost kids. It’s a bit creepy and could almost be cheesy since there’s also an organ involved, but Jurado is able to pull it off in the end. To say Maraqopa is an introspective album is to be modest, Jurado uses his songs wisely to divulge fears of being left alone, most notably on the title track and “Museum of Flight”. The latter song will probably become one of the saddest, romantic songs of the year.
“So On, Nevada” is one of the most uniquely Damien Jurado songs on the album, Meaning that it’s reminiscent of his earlier work while the rest of Maraqopa sounds heavily influenced by Nick Drake’s Bryter Layter and Neil Young. However, how bad can that really be? Maraqopa’s 1970s cigarette haze is a nice addition to a year that’s seen mostly electronic/plugged in releases so far. It’s nice to have someone bring us into a nostalgia further set than the current 1990s heavy sound or futuristic electronic beats. Even if it eventually gets lost amongst the plentiful “introspective singer-songwriter” albums available, Damien Jurado proves this is worth more than one listen.
7.7/10
Songs I Starred on Spotify:
- Life Away From the Garden
- Reel to Reel
- Working Titles
- So On, Nevada
- Museum Of Flight
