Fancy a journey to the dark side of the human heart, where jealousy feeds rage and murder is just a blink of the eye away? No? Well, tough, because Damien Jurado has just grabbed you off the street and hurled you into the boot of his car, and is now - as he makes clear on Northbound - speeding "without caution on a road made of ice". Jurado has been to some pretty raw emotional places before. But with On My Way to Absence, he lays bare the basic - and not always pretty - human motivations in a way only a handful of albums have ever managed to do. File this near Lou Reed's Berlin, John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band, Nirvana's In Utero - the albums you can't listen to often, but you know you really need to sometimes.
Secretly Canadian