Berman still delivers with newfangled Silver Jews honky-tonk

Freddy Deknatel Arts Editor

David Berman’s last Silver Jews album, 2001’s Bright Flight, was basically a country record, its slow twang and close, broken singing descendent from the blissful, playful folk that used to thrive, particularly, in Cambridge, MA. I bought Berman’s newest Silver Jews release, Tanglewood Numbers, in Harvard Square and I admit, scanning its case on Mt. Auburn St., I imagined songs like “How Can I Love You (If You Won’t Lie Down)” as B-sides to Bright Flight, or, in effect, slacker Bob Dylan indie rock. Clearly, I was trying hard to align Berman’s Nashville-by-way-of-New York songwriting with Harvard Square and all it remembers.

But Tanglewood Numbers is not quiet country. Nor is it the simple, sometimes melodic plugging-in of past Silver Jews’ albums Starlite Walker or American Walker, which are on par with any Pavement record. This is loud, upfront, and at times campy rock n’ roll, and the honky-tonk studio mixing sounds jarringly unlike Berman’s past. Berman and the Tanglewood Numbers band take more liberties with a songwriting manner that has always been partly cheesy and partly catchy. Here, sometimes, it’s downright tawdry. Chord progressions are simpler, with more throw-your-fist-in-the-air bravado. His lyrics, which have always walked a line between humor, wisdom, and nonsense, are filed down and far more direct. Poetry is lost in lines like “I loved you to the max!” on “Punks in the Beerlight” and “I’d rather live in a trashcan/ Than see you happy with another man” from “K-Hole.” Only the most die-hard Silver Jews fans, it seems, would disagree.

But the campiness does reel you in. The band is fast and revved-up and Berman’s singing sometimes leads the charge and sometimes has to catch-up. Eventually the words come through in the amped studio singing. “I’ve been working in an airport bar/ It’s like Christmas in a submarine/ Wings and brandy on a winter’s night/ I guess you wouldn’t call it a scene” rings on “I’m Getting Back Into Getting Back Into You.” And the initial roughness of lines like “I heard they were taming the shrew/ I heard the shrew was you/ You might as well say fuck me ‘cause I’m gonna keep on, keep on lovin’ you” on “Sleeping Is The Only Love,” while not holding up to American Water’s lyrics, do show a certain sloppy eloquence after a few listens.

Berman’s crack addiction and Zanax overdose in 2003 have been almost fetishly reported, his life after Bright Flight apparently coming to reflect his fractured songwriting and his image as the drunk, drugged poet. He’s rehabbing here on Tanglewood Numbers with a song-by-song program where he has become less a poet singing slacker songs and more a folk rocker with bad memories, bald, reflective lyrics, and seasoned studio players—wife Cassie, Will Oldham and most of what used to be Pavement—as back-up.

Opener “Punks in the Beerlight” surges with a chorus line of “two burnouts in love” over pounding guitars and a blasting keyboard line. And “How Can I Love You (If You Won’t Lie Down)” is a rollicking thumper with Cassie and Berman doing a their best impression of another famous Nashville couple.

At the end, on “There Is a Place,” after a soft beginning, Berman explodes in accelerating, repeated bursts of “I saw God’s shadow on this world.” He has been a drunk, then sobered up, fallen back in love, and is now broken down, his travels and addictions over. A coda of warm strumming wraps up what is deliverance for, perhaps, the Johnny Cash of indie rock.