What's New, Tomboy?

A sequel of sorts to its immediate predecessors, The Horizon Just Laughed and In the Shape of the Storm, What’s New, Tomboy? is Damien Jurados third straight self-production following 20 years of working with outside help. Whereas 2019s In the Shape of the Storm stripped things down to a near-bare minimum containing only the singer/songwriters voice and acoustic guitar along with spare additional guitar by Josh Gordon, Tomboy fleshes things out with organ, light drums, and, most conspicuously, bass guitar by Gordon. Jurado keeps the execution restrained and intimate, however, on what is also his second album for Mama Bird Recording Co. Beginning with the modestly country-inflected Birds Tricked Into the Trees, he traverses country-rock, spare folk, and gentle psychedelia on the ten-song set, over half of which consists of character sketches named for their subjects. One such track is Ochoa, a tribute to his good friend and frequent collaborator Richard Swift (born Ricardo Ochoa), who passed away in 2018. With instrumentation slimmed down to acoustic guitar and bass, the song opens with the lines Youd weigh the day/Falling fast asleep/Id watch the sky turn in your eyes to blue. Typical of Jurados evocative, starkly poetic lyrical style but also distinctly personal, the songs poignancy is compounded by delicate fingerpicking and a perfectly flawed vocal delivery. He employs a more insistent, time-keeping kick drum and shaker on Arthur Aware (Arthur, aware of his heavy hand/Swung toward his suitcase…), in addition to ghostly backing vocals and vibraphones that appear in between stanzas. A track inspired by cleaning the house of most of his possessions (including several guitars), the trippier When You Were Few instead offers a full lineup of prominent bass, electric guitar, organ, and drums, but is so efficient that it only lands like a full-fledged psych-rock entry in the context of the other songs. Taken together, Whats New, Tomboy? is another moving collection of American snapshots from the troubadour, if likely less memorable than his higher-contrast outings. ~ Marcy Donelson