Lookout Mountain Lookout Sea

by

Silver Jews

Edit

There's something different about this one. Musically, you can kind of tell that it's a real band rather than just a bunch of friends and pickup musicians. This group has been playing together and it shows. The drums play on the beat instead of slouching behind, the bass is locked in solidly, and the guitars and keyboard chug, sizzle and gallop atop that solid platform.

Lyrically, it strikes me as quite different from David Berman's earlier work, though I haven't yet put my finger on exactly what is different about it, other than the two narrative lyrics ("Aloysius, Bluegrass Drummer" and "San Francisco, BC") -- I don't think Berman has written real stories into his songs like these before.

In a sense I miss the slacker voice of the earlier albums, with imagery thrown together in a way that almost appeared random, but was obviously the product of a lot of well-hidden craft. Musically, those songs fitted the lyrics. The band never sounded sloppy, but they never sounded so tight that you doubted their casual attitude towards the music.

But this one is a lot tighter, both musically and lyrically. And while the themes of self-doubt, despair and suicide are still there, they are a little further below the surface, and the suicides ("Candy Jail", "My Pillow is the Threshold" if I'm reading those songs right) are no longer the singer's but those of people he knew. It's really a much more optimistic album than any that came before, including Tanglewood Numbers. It's not cheery, but it seems to offer some solutions, rather than just problems. This is best seen in the songs that bookend the album. The first one offers a philosophy of future possibility rather than past/present despair, and the last also looks to a future with a realistic eye on the possibility of a mature love that just might last, if.

It's nice to see David Berman's head in a happier, healthier space after the anguish and despair (buried beneath casual ironic cool but unmistakable) that filled the grooves of Bright Flight.

A great album.

Regardless of how many once-mumbly 90s artists decided at the end of their career to release an album of mostly straightforward pop music, regardless of this album's having happened to follow immediately after the Jews' only other untempo work, suggesting some sort of trajectory -- it's pretty boring.

Unlike Tanglewood Numbers, which sounded like Berman on an unhealthy amount of uppers but otherwise still very much himself (with all of his attendant lyrical flourishes), Lookout Mountain is weirdly unembellished, and not in a particularly good way. Even for that, it doesn't sound entirely uncharacteristic, and his wife Cassie plays an even larger role than on the past two albums, producing some of their better collaborative tunes this side of "Tennessee." The problem is, there's not a single track on this album that's halfway as good as "Tennessee."