Drag City
2008
Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea
About This Album
Whether its songs were autobiographical or not, Tanglewood Numbers carried the weight of the hard times David Berman survived before making the album. By contrast, Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea is one of the Silver Jews' lightest albums, at times surpassing the most playful moments of Starlite Walker and American Water. Berman's sly sense of humor has always been a vital -- maybe even the most vital -- ingredient in the Silver Jews' music, but some of the songs here are so goofy, at least on the surface, they might put off fans who want him to be only a serious writer or wry raconteur. "Party Barge" opens with gleefully fake seagull sound effects and just gets wackier from there, with Berman and his wife, Cassie, trading off lyrics like "Send me your coordinates and I'll send a Saint Bernard." Yet even the silliest-seeming songs aren't trivial -- and like most Silver Jews songs, they're eminently quotable: the album's longest and wildest song, "San Francisco B.C.," a six-minute epic involving an ex-girlfriend who is a "vocal martyr in the vegan press," has almost as many narrative developments as a small novel; "Candy Jail" may have fittingly sugary marimba melodies, but the first words out of Berman's mouth are "pain works on a sliding scale.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5,6 and 7)

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