"In 1984, I was hospitalized for approaching perfection." As first lines of an album go, this one, the opening shot fired on Silver Jews' 1998 album American Water, is among the greats, up there with Raw Power's "I'm a street-walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm" and Straight Outta Compton's "You are now about to witness the strength of street knowledge." It's an especially great line coming from Silver Jews' David Berman because "perfection" as a concept has little place in his universe. In this landscape, flubbed notes exist alongside amazing guitar solos (when Berman's buddy Stephen Malkmus is around, anyway), shirts are untucked, keys are more suggestions than rules, some of the best lyrics in rock history are interspersed with unapologetic groaners (I could kiss the guy who wrote, "Come to Tennessee/ 'Cause you're the only ten I see") and characters are often flawed to the point of paralysis.
Perfection being what it is for Silver Jews, and Berman being so comfortable with that notion, it's easy for fans to gloss over the rough patches. I have a feeling I'm not alone when I say that on every SJ record-- save American Water, almost-- I still skip around a bit. The nature of Silver Jews allows for inconsistent albums, even though the records appear infrequently. Two or three or four duff tracks on one record is nothing to get worked up about, and they may even add to the ramshackle charm. And so while Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea, the first Silver Jews album in almost three years, has the usual small handful of eh-to-just-OK tracks, it also feels different from prior Silver Jews albums in a way that's hard to put a finger on.
Part of it could be the lack of knockout songs. There are no instant entries to the SJ canon, nothing here that knocks you on your ass, not a single "How did he write that?" moment. And this problem is there from the beginning, the opening, where SJ have always killed: Where Tanglewood Numbers grabbed us by the throat with "Punks in the Beerlight" and The Natural Bridge turned a chair around and sat us down to explain "How to Rent a Room", Lookout Mountain opens with the plodding and dull "What Is Not But Could Be If". You feel like you just tripped and fell awkwardly into the album.
It doesn't help that the production is oddly harsh and distant-sounding; where Berman sounds best clear and uncluttered, so that it seems like he's engaging you in conversation, on this record his voice has a weirdly persistent metallic reverb clinging to it, like he's broadcasting from inside a tin can and you're straining to connect with him. Something about the sound makes him sound a bit uneasy, stiff, and a touch less confident. Busy Nashville producer Mark Nevers handled a chunk of the recording and all the mixing, and the warmth he's been known to give albums by Lambchop, Bonnie "Prince" Billy, and the Clientele is missing here. Berman's bassist and vocalist wife Cassie is, as she was on Tanglewood Numbers, far too high in the mix. There were some weird choices made in the studio.
I shouldn't dwell on the production, since this band started out as the lo-ist of the lo-fi, recording white noise-packed songs on answering machines-- and besides, you listen to Silver Jews for words. But an album that finds Berman in a more focused mode lyrically, writing lines that seem to straighten out some of his bent lyrical aesthetic, would do well to come with a more welcoming sound. In any event, there are still good songs with quotable lines here, thankfully, and the tunes throughout are solid. The lengthy, bouncy, Dylan-y "San Francisco B.C.", in particular, is packed with lyrical nuggets: "We had sarcastic hair/ We used lude (sic) pseudonyms/ We got a lot of stares on the street back then" and "She said, 'You don't make enough to provide for me'/ I said, 'What about the stuff that we-- quote-- believe?'" are two. (I love how you can picture the fingers in the air setting aside the word "believe.")
If the focus throughout seems to move away from stringing together rich, penetrating images, Berman is still skilled enough with words to make him do what he wants them to. The peppy, rushed "Aloysius, Bluegrass Drummer" is a surreal short story, with a title character who is a dishwasher at a restaurant "Open 'til the end of time" and who falls for a girl "all strung-out on hard street fat." And then the weary countrified lament "Strange Victory, Strange Defeat"-- which wonders about the "handsome grandsons in these rockband magazines" who have supplanted "the fat ones, the bald and the goateed"-- works pretty well, even if the second half of the song doesn't stick. The closing track, "We Could Be Looking for the Same Thing"-- a cozy ballad that finds David duetting with Cassie-- strips the lyrical flourishes back almost completely: Lines like "Where the days turn the weeks into months of the year" and "I've been around some and I've seen enough to know/ We could spend happy lives, inside the days of you and me" could have been written by any number of singer-songwriters. That seems purposeful: Berman seems to have something specific that he wants to get across, and he's OK saying it in what, for him, is a direct way.
With both Lookout Mountain and Tanglewood Numbers, there's been discussion about these records being made after Berman's time staring into the abyss, when he survived a suicide attempt, worked through a serious drug problem, got married, started touring, and generally got his shit together. So it's tempting to hear some of the differences with this record-- the tamer imagery, the more even keel, the highs that aren't so high-- as somehow mirroring the changes in Berman's personal life. For me, though-- since I never knew how tough Berman had it while enjoying his records up through Bright Flight, never had a clue as to depths of his suffering, and never heard his music in that context-- it seems wrong to start thinking about such things now. Instead, I prefer to think of Lookout Mountain as an album of pretty-good songs from a guy who has written some unbelievably great ones, and will, more than likely, write some more of that quality down the road. There's never been any kind of definable arc with the Silver Jews, no movement toward a fixed point; it's more about keepin' on keepin' on. Once perfection is off the table, and you're just doing the best you can with what you have, there will be moments like this.
