One of the joys of reviewing records is discovering a new band from way outside your normal style selection and falling totally in love with them. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea by The Silver Jews, a blissful subversion of Americana and pop music.
To my ear, the music itself isn’t particularly astonishing. The Silver Jews use the standard arsenal of Americana: both types of guitars plus pedal-steel, organs and pianos, all underpinned by the freight-train clatter of simple drumming. They celebrate this simplicity in Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea’s packaging: the lyrics – handwritten among doodles on stationary from small-town businesses and railroad companies – come complete with the chord sequences, and there’s a little pull-out card of chord diagrams, too. “You can play this stuff,” they’re saying.
Over the top, Silver Jews frontman David Berman spins yarns in an understated and slightly weary sounding tone, like a less damaged Johnny Cash – and what yarns they are. Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea is a collection of little narratives with hidden layers, surreal on the surface but concealing some wry insights into the human condition.
There’s no “home, home on the range” stuff here, in other words. Berman’s deadpan delivery takes us on a trip through small-town America, peering into the front-rooms and dusty bar-diners to see what stories we can find, while The Silver Jews play mellow pop progressions from a more innocent dimension than our own. But Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea isn’t a dull slice of realism, oh no – it’s full of silly fun and intelligent humour.
“San Francisco, B.C.” probably sums up the appeal of Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea. It’s a weird jaunt through the last four decades of the counterculture, with cartoon hipsters and hucksters hustling their way around a crazy narrative of dodgy jobs, seedy joints and broken relationships. That may not sound particularly amusing, but it’s almost impossible to explain how it works without transcribing the lyrics – put it this way, it’s full of lines like:
“… since her dad, a local barber, had been beaten to death / she had become a vocal martyr in the vegan press.”
Then there’s “Candy Jail”, an endearingly silly song about doing time surrounded by a sweet tooth’s fantasy; there’s “Suffering Jukebox”, a lament for small-town loneliness (”sufferin’ jukebox, such a sad machine / you’re all filled up with what other people mean”); and there’s “Party Barge” … oh, they’re all good. Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea is a handful of little gems, and the more you polish them by listening, the better they get.
I can’t tell you whether you’ll like The Silver Jews or not; I expect a lot of people won’t, and I suspect I might have dismissed them had I not had them thrust under my nose with the arrival of Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea. But let me assure you – if you love music for it’s ability to entertain and talk truths dressed up in meandering fantasy, you should do yourself a favour and check it out.
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Posted in Music reviews |
Tags: Americana, blues, country, indie, Lookout Mountain Lookout Sea, The Silver Jews, weird
