Silver Jews Gilt Lyrical Gems Soar 'Bright' on New Release

Author: Allison Quady Arts EDitor

"Bright Flight," the Silver Jews' new album recently released on Chicago-based Drag City simmers with warm, ready to eat, poetic Americana. Singer/song write and frontman David Berman brings the album to melancholic life with his lyrics and a new emphasis on instrumentals.

Berman collaborated with Stephan Malkmus and Bob Nostanovich from Pavement, on the first Silver Jews album, "Starlight Walker," and has since gone his own way with the Silver Jews in the release of 10 subsequent albums with an ever-changing cast of musicians. Besides writing for the Silver Jews, Berman is a published poet and author of "Actual Air," a book of sometimes sly and other times candid poems about the past and present.

The needs of the poet are strongly felt on all Silver Jews albums, wherein Berman sets the atmosphere in tone and content. The changing musicians in the band play backup to Berman's lyrical aesthetic. Berman's signature lyrics using real places, real people and song titles within songs capture the intimacy in his expression. The sound of the Silver Jews is easily traceable from their beginnings eight years ago to their present album, "Bright Flight." It is a sound of alternative, countrified rock.

"Bright Flight" is softer than his collaborative album, "Starlight Walker," with Malkmus and Nostanovich, and more conducive to Berman's folk aesthetic. The drums and guitar in "Bright Flight" never overpower Berman's voice singing to the listener in intimate conversation.

In the first song on the album, "Slow Education," Berman plays with a childish type of memory, singing, "Remember you wanted to be like George Washington back then…" and the chorus follows, "Oh oh oh I'm lightening/ Oh oh oh I'm rain/ Oh oh oh it's frightening/ I'm not the same, I'm not the same." As an opening song, "Slow Education" introduces memory and nature as themes that will continue to play roles in subsequent songs.

"Bright Flight's" songs tend to begin with Berman's voice followed by the addition of the drums, guitar, organ and other instruments. In "Room Games and Diamond Rain," Berman's poetry travels from city to country, journeying across the states east to west "on a western train." Berman is dreaming of an obsessive, infinite love and in his insistence on travel is unwilling to confine his subject to a place or a time.

There are also songs where Berman is a bit obtuse in his poetry, such as in "Time Will Break the World," in his repetition of "All my poor, hungry children." The song is heavy with world concerns and loses the hope of personal experience in its greater attempt to express anger at an undefined "mister."

More seductive are his songs about love; the dreamer's romantic love, bounded only by the images he chooses, such as "I Remember Me." Unexpectedly, the true lovers are separated, "He turned to her to ask if she'd marry him/ When a runaway truck hit him where he stood." The tragic-comic story of their thwarted destiny and the insistence on wallowing in the pain is reminiscent of country music, and of the songs that rest on the painful spots in the heart.

Berman relocated from Virginia to Nashville, Tenn., and he sings of his new home most explicitly in "Horseleg Swastikas."

It's up to the listener whether or not to take him seriously (hopefully the latter) when he sings, "I'm drunk on a couch in Nashville/ In a duplex near the reservoir/ And every single thought is like a punch in the face/ I'm like a rabbit freezing on a star." Nashville, home of so many country and folk singers, may be just the place for Berman to get the necessary down home twist he loves to wring out of his heartening songs. Berman seems to like the country, and although Nashville is city, I suppose he can wander out further into middle America to find greener pasture.

"Let's Not and Say We Did" is an ode to the country: "There's a trapdoor in the country where we can disappear./These giant evergreens are a promise redeemed/ Let's walk down the glassy top of a frozen pasture stream/ Our minds can dream like soda machines/ And that's exactly what we did." Berman finds a portal to another world in the country and he won't stop singing about getting away to do the things people did way back then, and are still doing all the time in the country. Berman's idealized countryside brings wistful associations of childhood, of summer and of vacation, to his music because in his country lifestyle there is time to do all of the things of which you dream. In the following song, he continues his pastoral reverie in "Tennessee," telling his girl to leave Kentucky and come to him in Tennessee. The girl, Cassie Marrett, responds in a sweet country duet, the song breaks and Berman picks up on a different theme (Punk rock died when the first kid said 'punk's not dead'), only to then revert to his former subject (taking his girl back to Tennessee). One of the two, the death of Louisville, or punk rock or both, are sound enough arguments convincing his girl to come to Tennessee.

Berman's memories and his vision of nature, place and love craft this album with a poet's subtle ideals and a country-western singer's emotional immersion.