In the early 1990s, "lo-fi" actually meant something interesting. For all the received ideas about songwriting and performance that had been booted aside in the previous 15 years, almost nobody had seriously interrogated the way rock recordings sounded. The understanding was that you were supposed to reproduce, as closely as possible, what a performance in the same room would have sounded like. Then a string of bands started deliberately doing recording "wrong," or at least asking to what, exactly, "fidelity" in music was supposed to be. Nobody did it wronger-on-purpose than Silver Jews, whose first two EPs-- 1992's Dime Map of the Reef and 1993's The Arizona Record--were pile-ups of cheap cassette wobble and flaws, song fragments, sloppy jams, and flubbed notes, with something cracked but wonderfully original radiating from within them.
The rumor, in 1992, was that this ridiculously named band was actually Pavement under a pseudonym. Dime Map of the Reef came out about a month after Slanted and Enchanted, on the label that had put out some of Pavement's earlier records, and one of the voices on it clearly belonged to one of the Pavement guys; it was obvious! (Fine, laugh. We didn't have Google back then.) Silver Jews weren't Pavement, but for a while the two bands shared singer/guitarist Stephen Malkmus and drummer Bob Nastanovich, and Pavement's early repertoire included "Secret Knowledge of Backroads" and "West S", both of which appear here. (Malkmus has even played the latter solo.)
It became evident with time that Silver Jews were very much singer/guitarist David Berman's band. They had the same progenitor as Pavement (University of Virginia band Ectoslavia), and a pretty similar knack for knotty riffs; both bands had obviously listened to the Fall a lot at an impressionable age. But Berman maybe cared a little less about tunes than Malkmus, and a little more about language. He, in fact, was the one who had come up with the phrase "slanted and enchanted."
Dime Map is more a thrown-down gauntlet than a collection of songs, opening with a fake tourist jingle for Canada and continuing for a packed 7" single's worth of recordings that refuse to behave. "The Unchained Melody"-- no relation to that other "Unchained Melody"-- rambles through an extended introduction, and cheekily fades out in the middle of its first verse. Berman begins "The Walnut Falcon" with a dramatic image of two rams clashing on a mountain, then immediately undercuts its seriousness: "The horns go thwop/ The horns go thwop/ And I'm looking for my snowy bed."
The nine tracks that made up The Arizona Record are more satisfying on their own: The sides of its original vinyl incarnation opened with the two skewed, compelling songs that the Jews shared with Pavement. It's also got a couple of fragmentary songlets-- "Jackson Nightz" cuts from a crappy recording of a promising riff to an even crappier cassette recording of the same, then back to the original version, mid-lyric, and fades out on a snatch of Malkmusian falsetto. But it ends with a piece that actually seems finished, the meditative instrumental guitar trio "Bar Scene from Star Wars".
The Arizona Record and Dime Map are all we get here, although it'd have been nice if this set included the band's other early recordings, including a side of a split single credited to "Silver Jews & Nico." Still, the early Silver Jews' whole aesthetic was built on enforced incompleteness-- suggesting that something amazing had happened on the nights they recorded in Bob Nastanovich's living room, and that they'd just barely managed to catch enough of it on the fly to imply its glory, like a fragment of a Sappho poem. As the Fall put it: "What really went on there? We only have this excerpt."
