Silver Jews

By Spencer Patterson

Thursday, June 12, 2008 | midnight

The Silver Jews’ long, shadowy existence as one of indie rock’s famously reclusive outfits officially ended in 2006, when leader David Berman overcame substance abuse and stage fright to take his project out on its first-ever tour. Two years later, that still-hard-to-believe development casts new disc Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea in an intriguing light: Now that the Jews are, at last, an actual, honest-to-goodness “band,” whatever will they sound like?

Listening to the sixth full-length album from a group few expected to progress beyond its über-lo-fi early ’90s roots, the answer resounds clearly—a stouter, more confident version of the Silver Jews. The 41-year-old Berman hasn’t focused his songwriting this sharply since American Water, and unlike on that 1998 catalog favorite, this time he doesn’t have old buddy Stephen Malkmus along for support.

What he has on Lookout, instead, are 10 countrified rock numbers built around lyrical narratives so appealingly descriptive, they should impel Nashville’s old-time outlaw writers to sit up and take notice. The fast-rollicking “Aloyisius, Bluegrass Drummer” speaks of a “No Wave singer for a country act”; six-minute epic “San Francisco B.C.” tells of a couple with “sarcastic hair” and a brawl culminating with “fist cuisine”; and the wistful “Suffering Jukebox”—featuring dreamy choruses from Berman’s wife, Cassie—pairs “Tennessee tendencies and chemical dependencies” to anthropomorphize the song’s titular machine.

Though it all breezes by in under 35 minutes, it’s more than enough to make longtime fans yearn for a day when they might hear the songs in concert. Oh yeah, except these days, seeing the Silver Jews live isn’t just a fantasy.

The bottom line: ****