Silver Jews
Bright Flight + the Tennessee EP
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Silver Jews
Bright Flight + the Tennessee EP
Drag City, 2001
RiYL: Pavement, Johnny Cash, Wilco |
David Berman, frontman for the Silver Jews, was one of the first rockers to impress me with his words as much as his tunes. On the Jews’ latest releases, Bright Flight and the Tennessee EP, he continues to captivate. Berman’s palette is a world in which George Washington shares a stage with the University of Tennessee Volunteers, the Royal Trux, tanning beds and a waterslide in Chattanooga. When he sings of a "sky…low and gray like a Japanese table" and "icicles dripping…like the whole house is weeping," he connects the dots of the painting with a talent usually reserved for classical sculptors and software designers. With the craft of a Raymond Chandler, he gives us words we can touch and feel as much as hear, singing about a time in which "every single thought is a punch in the face" and a girl whose "fuckin’ body broke my eyes." Berman makes you want to start a leaf collection, so you can spend hours with a magnifying glass looking at the intricate patterns of rivers and subway systems inscribed on their faces. You want to walk down the street and look for connections between traffic lights and lynch mobs.
On top of the words, the Jews give us a fleshed-out (for them at least) and lush collection of country tunes, building spacious crescendos that delight in their restraint and muscle-rock licks that show us they’ve complemented their Hank Williams with a dose of the harder side of Creedence. And then there are the little details that make the accompanying twang sound ever more profound: the fleeting and weird synth-drone that arrives in the middle of "Let’s Not And Say We Did," and the welcome vocal cameos provided by Berman’s girlfriend Cassie Marrett. There are a few tracks that don’t function as well as songs as they might have as straight poems, and one instrumental that should have been left out altogether.
Perhaps he could have just taken the three quality non-LP tracks from the EP and put them on the LP instead. Oh, well. I guess part of the reason I like Berman is that his words function just as well on a blank page as they do on a page of sheet music. His book of poetry, "Actual Air" (Open City), is full of those unlikely and delightful lyrical connections I’ve come to expect from one of the finest writers in rock, or outside of rock for that matter. And if he one day gives up the guitar for a sole devotion to the typewriter, I might still be satisfied. Ultimately, though, I think I would miss the way the words, the inflection and the voice resonate on top of the twang.
JOHN KNIGHT |