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Here, Jurado himself plays a bit of acoustic guitar and, of course, sings, his scratched out, wholly natural voice, as adept as ever at finding the feeling in the melodies. He sings in an unshowy, though not unimpressive way, skittering up into a fragile falsetto at intervals without the slightest strain. For this album, he tapped just one other musician, Josh Gordon, to add some bass and additional guitar. Gordon has been a collaborator since the start of this hushed, minimal phase of his career (he first appeared on The Horizon Just Laughed).  

The result is a string of songs that sound much simpler than they are, small, eccentric stories sketched in pencil, with surprisingly vivid, surreal language. The pared down nature of the music makes you expect the homespun and familiar, yet Jurado is always taking his narratives into strange, luminous, imaginary places. Consider, for instance, the comfortable folk country bounce of opener “Helena,” the lightness of its picking, the impudence of its jocular bass. It ought to be a song about country sunshine and pure-hearted farm girls, but instead veers into the underbelly of transient 21st century America. “Hello room from the room where I’m selling my clothes,” opens Jurado, and his tale gets weirder and more subversive from there. That’s one of the more unadorned cuts, but “Tom,” in muted full-rock mode is similarly hard to grasp. It seems to be a song about art and performing, with its verses about fair grounds and circuses, but it’s also about being a little lost. Jurado poses a riddle, asking “Would you go nowhere if you had to know where to go to?” and letting tricky strings of homonyms encapsulate the opaqueness of human existence.

There are some casual references to television characters. The haunting, “Song for Langston Birch” is named for a one-episode guest shot on Alice and “Johnny Caravella” for the DJ on WKRP in Cincinnati. The references are oblique, the transmissions growing faint with distance and passing time. The latter track, “Johnny Caravella,” is the disc’s longest, only tangentially related to the TV show, but dead-on in its assessment of confusion and inability to get on with things. As Jurado intimates, “Dear Johnny Midnight, Dear Johnny Cool/I’m consulting the cards afterhours in my room/I know I should leave but I don’t have my shoes or the courage.”

Jurado’s records are always slow burners, but this minimalist one takes an especially long time to catch fire. It sounds like less than it is for half a dozen spins and then suddenly rears up, fully-formed and out of hiding. It may not be as mesmerizing as the Richard Swift triad, but The Monster That Hated Pennsylvania is its own odd, quiet, disconcerting triumph. It makes much out of little, or rather finds the much that was in the little all along.