SILVER JEWS
Feature: 6.3SE
Music
STRANGE VICTORY
wordsby saelan twerdy
Lo-fi country legend David Berman has kicked his habit and he’s ready to take on the world with a brand new album, Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea. It’s righteous and sturdy and calling bullshit on a corrupt world. Saelan Twerdy is your tour guide on a journey through Berman’s dark night of the soul, and onward into a brighter future.
The Silver Jews should need no introduction. Over six albums and more than fifteen years, David Berman’s kinda lo-fi, kinda country group has been through hell and back and become an indie-rock touchstone along the way – and that’s with virtually zero touring and an absolute minimum of live performance prior to just a year or two ago, when the Silver Jews finally hit the road. Like Will Oldham, Smog’s Bill Callahan, and Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus (who was Berman’s roommate in college, and a frequent contributor to Silver Jews albums), David Berman has become one of the voices of his generation. Notoriously plagued by a drug addiction that, in the last couple of years, he’s finally overcome, Berman’s songs have always looked into the darkest voids of human experience and come back to tell the story with a dry sense of humour and sublime self-possession rivalled only by the likes of Johnny Cash and Lee Hazelwood. A great American humourist and storyteller in the vein of Mark Twain, Berman is also a published poet whose book, Actual Air, sits on a lot of nighttables as the only volume of contemporary poetry that a lot of right-thinking people will admit to liking. His newest album, Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea is, to be brief, a total fucking triumph. If 2006’s Tanglewood Numbers was his first foray into a world beyond personal catastrophe, this album is him taking on the world at large. As he sings in “Strange Victory, Strange Defeat,” the album’s centerpiece, “We’re coming out of the black patch/we’re coming out of the pocket/we’re calling into question/this virtue gone to seed.” He was kind enough to take time out of his current European tour to answer some of our questions.
