Album Review: Jake Curran – Purgative Ways

What comes through quite quickly on Purgative Ways, the new album from Jake Curran, is how personal the album is, and how filled with love it is.

It’s not only a document that references developments in the last few decades of indie, alt., and folk music, but it also serves as an insight into changes in Curran’s life in recent years. In large part it comes from the point of view of an artist navigating his way from single life to marriage.

Recurring themes within Curran’s lyrics throughout the album include faith, love, and doubt. He searches not just for answers to some of his life’s enduring questions, but guidance through the compromises and sacrifices we all have to make in order to find those answers, as well as make a place for others in our lives.

You can read the album as being about a relationship with a loved one, but it also often works on a greater, spiritual scale. And that’s not just in terms of literal tales detailing long car journeys, as in Carolina, but also in Virginia, that extra few yards – yards that can quickly become miles – we need to travel within ourselves to get where we need to be.

That love feeds into expressions of faith, and again that faith may be temporal, finding someone to share your life with and give you direction. Purgative Ways does hint to Curran finding part of that on the spiritual plane as he experiences events large and small, ones that test him as they guide him.

It’s as if doubt, death, and occasionally being adrift and apart are stepping stones that help him find the answers, and through that, finding himself and the confidence to help and share with others, that message becoming stronger as the album plays out. Hindsight, in particular, allows Curran to let loose sonically but also give of himself to someone else.

Though the album discovers some of its voice in the early 00s releases of The Lumineers and Bright Eyes on the likes of Hit the Road, Curran weaves in other, unexpected influences. 70s Bob Dylan, the country/gospel roots of Gram Parsons, as on Simple Man, and the open-road rock of Violent Femmes assist him to create his own narrative and share that with us freely.

Purgative Ways, then, can be viewed as centred on love and belief: how we need to find that in ourselves and for ourselves, accepting the help, love and faith of others to discover what we are and what we can become.