Recap: Damien Jurado at The Turf Club  

When a musician plays solo acoustic in a bar, it can be an uphill battle for both the audience and the performer. No musician likes having to strain their voice and pound their six-string to be heard above the bar banter, and even genuine fans can be lured away from the stage by the promise of beer and friendly conversation in back—especially if a performer can't find a way to wield the limited sonic weapons of an acoustic show and dominate the room. Damien Jurado’s show at The Turf Club on Thursday served as a reminder that a acoustic solo show can be just as dynamic as a plugged-in band performance.

Since becoming a presence on the national indie scene with his late ’90s debut on Sub Pop, Jurado’s alternated between folk-leaning albums—so rustic in tone they sound like outtakes from Harry Smith's Anthology Of American Folk Music—to more textured modern-rock albums. With no set list to guide him, Jurado filled up the Turf with just his wounded yowl and skeletal fingerpicking for a 60-minute set that touched down on all points of his catalog, from early classics like “Letters & Drawings,” off of 1999’s Rehearsals For Departure, to unreleased material written just before heading out on tour.

Jurado fully inhabited his brooding character sketches, equally believable on songs as emotionally divergent as "Ohio," in which he gently cooed as the starry-eyed suitor to a girl in trouble, and "The Killer," in which he's an unrepentant serial killer barking his head off. Although his songs chronicle almost solely downbeat and dishonest people—adultery playing a prominent role—Jurado the man proved affable and upbeat. Stopping repeatedly throughout the night to throw in witty asides, he lightened the mood by bringing up his 9-year-old son (“He hates all my songs and is really into Kraftwerk—I must be doing something right”) and letting the audience in on his plans for the rest of the evening (“We’re doing a lot of ghost hunting on this tour so we’ll be headed to the graveyard after this to take some pictures. We’ve been capturing really crazy auras.”). When the show reached its end with the forcefully strummed catharsis of “Lose My Head” and the subtly menacing “Now I’m In Your Shadow,” the audience of about 150 became transfixed. The battle of bar vs. bard? Jurado won, hands down.