Pitchfork

Despite all the warning signs flung at me, I still feel cheated, somehow. As the title makes abundantly clear, Postcards and Audio Letters is a collection of found recordings of conversations, salvaged from cassettes found at thrift stores and garage sales. Yes, it says "Damien Jurado" on the disc's spine, but he's credited only with "tape salvation and editing"; he doesn't sing or play on the album. In fact, there's no music on it at all. Instead, he's compiled 60 straight minutes of people talking.

To Jurado's credit, he has selected and arranged the recordings such that a vague theme of love and relationships immediately arises. There's Robert and Angel, the regretful ex-lovers living in different countries; the bickering grandparents rambling on about what they did for Christmas; the lovestruck Dawn and Phil and their mushy answering machine messages; and Jim and Sharon, a divorced couple arguing over the welfare of their child.

Sound like an interesting concept? Perhaps. Maybe the mere presence of Jurado, who's released two excellent albums of Nick Drake-like acoustic folk melancholy, is enough to keep your interest piqued. But would you really want to pay $10 or more for this? Think about it for a second: Postcards and Audio Letters is the type of peripheral art project that Jurado could just as easily have posted on his website in MP3 or even low-res RealAudio. With the Internet around, there's simply no reason (aside from the obvious financial one) to sell a disc of this material. It's not like the sound quality needs to be crystal clear, and besides, you aren't likely to listen to it more than twice, anyway.

I'm not comfortable making any judgments of the artistic merits of Postcards and Audio Letters; as far as I can tell, Jurado succeeded at what he set out to do with it. But in the end, all we're really doing is listening to other people's answering machine messages. Voyeurism is only worthwhile when the people you're eavesdropping on are saying something interesting. Yes, Damien, it is indeed real life, but there's a reason "Big Brother" sucks.