Thursday, May 01, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

CDVS

Being called "our generation's Neil Young" can't be an easy cross to bear--especially when you're a pasty-faced, guitar-strumming chunker from the Pacific Northwest. Unfortunately, that's the burden that Alternative Press has saddled singer/songwriter Damien Jurado with, and not surprisingly, after a few listens to Where Shall You Take Me, it proves to be a label neither earned nor deserved.

That's not to say that Jurado's album--his fifth, full-length studio effort--is bad. It's actually quite good (a contemporary alt-country classic, you might say), an album almost everyone would benefit from listening to in a dark room with a half-pint of molasses-brown booze and a tall glass. But to call it the heir apparent to Young belies a profound confusion about Young's place in the history of rock 'n' roll--a fact perfectly illustrated by his most gloomy (and therefore widely rejected) album Tonight's the Night. Now keep in mind, we're talking about Neil Young before he made the regrettable decision to duet with Eddie Vedder on the MTV Music Awards and before that whole synth-pop, "Transformer Man" debacle. Those we'll just have to chalk up to the vagaries of old age and a history of drug abuse come home to roost.

That said, Tonight's the Night is a unique work of art. Written and recorded immediately after the death of longtime roadie Bruce Berry from a heroin overdose, the album is an acoustic-electric funeral dirge, lamenting both the loss of a friend and a loss of musical innocence. In fact, the title track is a straightforward account of Berry's life: "Bruce Berry was a working man/ He used to load that Econoline van." At the same time, Tonight's the Night is a rejection of the fame and adulation Young received on the heels of After the Gold Rush and the immensely popular Harvest. You see, the scraggly, long-haired Young of the '70s couldn't reconcile his search for authenticity with his commercial success--thus his desire to "find somewhere where they don't care who I am" ("Albuquerque").

Now, no matter how good Damien Jurado's snapshots of Midwestern cultural despair might be (and "I Can't Get Over You" and "Bad Dreams" are as heart-wrenching as they are haunting), they simply cannot compare with the simple, sublime anguish expressed in the 12 tracks on Tonight's the Night. Therefore, I would suggest that we be more careful with our comparisons in the future. I mean, why risk muddying the waters of history any further with our metaphorical bungling?--Newt Briggs