September 1996| CMJ

The Natural Bridge, the first Pavement-member-free Silver Jews record, finds songwriter David Berman backed by a group including members of Plush and New Radiant Storm King, Berman is a sure-handed poet/lyricist and a decidedly unslick singer-imagine if Leonard Cohen had a propensity toward the "leaping poetry" of Neruda. These songs are ruffled by the winds of travel and American history("Albemarle Station" goes from a split-level ranch" to a "drive-in with ivy growing over the screen"). Almost all of their lyrics have some organizing principle, though few of them are straightforward descriptions or narratives. "Ballad of Reverend War Character" is a catalog of losers and hopeless situations;"How To Rent A Room" suggests a note from somebody who's vanished or dead. Logocentric though they are, the Silver Jews pay attention to their(melancholic, gentle, often piano-based)music as well, to the point of including a splendid instrumental cunningly titled" The Right To Remain Silent." Start with the country lament "Black And Brown Blues" or "The Frontier Index," a series of jokes and mediations that features both a lovely, atmospheric noise solo and the immortal lyric"A robot walks into a bar/orders a drink/lays down a bill/The bartender says, 'Hey we don't serve robots'/and the robot says,'Oh but someday you will."

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October 1996 | Melody Maker

Have we got Jews for you
"All houses dream in blueprints; our houses dream so hard/Outside you can see my shoeprints. I've been dreaming in this yard..."

A simple Silver Jews test: Listen to "Pet Politics", which starts off amiably agreeing to sound like agreeably aimless lo-fi whimsy - You never know/When your pet will go"-only to swerve around, in it's delicate piano-and-snare tracks, and suddenly make the stars shrivel and your eyes well with implausible tears.

"Guard my bed/While the rain turns the ditches to mirrors.. I suspect we could be losing now/Please guard my bed."

Every other song-writer, in other words-with the exception of Smog's Bill Callahan, and even then only just-might as well stick to instrumentals from here on in.

"What if life is just some hard equation/On a chalkboard in a science class for ghosts?"

Holy Raymond Carver, basically. Holy Hal Hartley. Holy ee cummings. Hyperbole? I've Heard alot of records, but none like David Berman's, whose songs come studded with lines recalling exactly that paradoxingly wistful savagery. ("The moon ratttles in its box of sky/Like a fragment of angry candy") cummings invented.And it's wrapped in a lovingly, seemingly ramshackle and impromptu (but probably neither) amble of a sound: unsmirkingly country-flavoured , full of sudden expaniveness and "Sister Lovers" bereftness, borne aloft by tunes bright as new pennies. Tunes sung in Berman's warm crumple of a Lou Reed-meets-Jim Reeves voice, with it's drawled, half-ironic, half despairing delivery full of scavenged barroom jokes and tragic comedy. From the bleak dignity of the Marlboro-Man-With-A-Broken-Heart of "How To Rent A Room" all the way to acidic "Dallas" and beyond, there's not a song on here that fails to astonish.

"Watchin'the makeup girls makeout with the mannequinns/Hey, boys, supper's on me-our record just went aluminum."

And, you'll be heartened to hear, they're astinishing for reasons other than the Silver Jews' disproportionately well-known Payment connection. But Steve and Bob are no longer Silver Jews, and the only change is that this album, the successor to 1994's "Starlite Walker", is so clearly its superior, so exhilerating, I feel like I've just discovered electricity rather than a mere CD.

"It's raining Triple Sec Tchula/And the radio plays 'Crazy Train'." This is a record to love, a record to swarm greedily over gobbling it up line by line. Waiting on the edge of your seat for the hairpin idiosyncrasies, What Comes Next, for the private joy of treasuring personel favorite phrase after funny, sad, beautiful, uselessly hopeless phrase. Waiting for the foolish optimism of a hick-shuffle "Balck and Brown Shoes" with it's longing "Nothing could make me feel better than a wet kiss on the mouth", or the wryly despairing vignettes of "The Ballad of Reverend War Character" in which "The stars don't shine upon us/We're in the way of their light".-

Waiting for that gorgeously glove comfortable, slouching shrug of jangle and pedal steel and piano-ache and intimate tick of drumsticks on cymbals;the bourbany swagger of "Inside The Golden Days of Missing You"; the hypnotic guitar ripples of "The Right To Remain Silent" as discordant voices unsettingly frizzle below.

But you hardly have to wait at all. It's out next week. "Now that I'm older, subspace is colder/I just want to say something true."

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December 1996| Spin

Charlottesville, Virginia, poet David Berman specializes in folksy, hungover country-rock, twinkling jangle pops through the meloncholy only to be beaten down like the little plastic rodents in a carnival "Whack-a-mole"game. Bermans dead path baritone delivery doesn't waver, not when circumstances are turning his insides out with loss, not where he savors a rush or gets lost in his women's jewel-encrusted hair. Like a numbed Leonard Cohen, his music through comforting and comfortable, never vies for attention with the deliberateness of his recital.

Berman has collaborated on true-life absurbisms with his old University of Virginia classmate Stephen Malkmus, of Pavement, and he may be even better at capturing that band's sometime tone of ragged nostalgia. Effortlessly evocative, his lyrics summon a corduroy suit "Made of a hundred guitars that the rain can run right through." L.A. Lakers cheerleaders the suffering people of Cleveland Berman tells bad joke after bad joke, finally climaxing with a story of a long-haired boy who asks for a car from his dad. "Boy says, Hey dad, Jesus had long hair" Dad says, 'That's right son, but Jesus walked everywhere.'"(Drag City, PO Box 84/686/, Chicago, IL 60647