Notes from overboard

American Water cover

Silver Jews – American Water

Drag City

A-

One line, from the song "We Are Real", best sums up this album’s charm: "Won’t soul music change now that our souls have turned strange." The Silver Jews play music for and about strange souls, bemused amblers who see the world through beer-tinted glasses.

The main ingredient here is the lyrical brilliance of Dave Berman, who is the Silver Jews for all intents and purposes (none of the same players return from Berman’s previous outing, The Natural Bridge). Possessing the pathos and cracked, folksy profundity of the late writer Richard Brautigan, Berman is a dry tragic-comic, enjoyable even when inscrutable. When he lights poetic firecrackers like "I love your amethyst eyes, your protestant thighs, you’re a shimmering socialite jewel" and "The drums march along at the clip of an I.V. drip like sparks from a muffler dragged down the strip", you’ll find yourself perusing American Water’s lyric sheet while listening, at least at first.

Berman’s words are well-complimented by his voice, a cozy, relaxed drawl (bolstered by nimble backups from Berman cohort and Pavement leader Steve Malkmus), and the economic music, a deceptively simple patchwork of steely-pretty guitars and shuffling rhythms that add up to a sort of reimagined, dry and angular southern funk-rock, or Neil Young scoring a melancholy silent cowboy film. If you hear anyone call this "alt-country", shoot them. Then note the way "Send In The Clouds" erupts and the way "Buckingham Rabbit" resigns for evidence of the tasty playing predominant here.

The Saturday night singalong "Honk If You’re Lonely" and the percolating "People" are among the gems of these dozen tracks, but nothing can match the heartbreaking opener, "Random Rules". Tarted up by horns and punctuated by a perfect little guitar solo, Berman spins a regretful tale that would seem to be about screwing up a relationship but making one last doomed pitch to save it anyway.

But you’re never really sure, just like you may not know what happened exactly after the bars closed, the only cars on the road are you and the cops and there’s nothing left to do but go home or get into some sort of trouble. There’s no specific word for this feeling, but Silver Jews go a long way toward inventing one on American Water.

--Lane Hewitt

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