Almost no one reads poetry anymore, which
means that you probably haven’t read Actual Air, one of the very
few poetry collections written by a working singer/songwriter
that’s worth a damn (sorry, Jewel). Praised by former poet
laureate Billy Collins and The New
Yorker, the book proves that
David Berman isn’t just another singer/songwriter with
delusions of bard-dom — something that Silver Jews fans
already knew. Whereas most lyrics go flat on the page, all their
pretty idiocies exposed in the glaring silence, Berman’s
words stand on their own irregular feet. Berman, who has an MFA in
creative writing, would probably hesitate to call his lyrics poems,
but they might as well be. Just pick up any Silver Jews CD, read
the lyric booklet straight through without first listening to the
songs, and marvel over the fact that you never once feel ashamed to
be human. Tanglewood Numbers resembles its predecessors insofar as it’s
overflowing with brilliant language, couplets so strange and yet so
perfectly natural that you want to brand them on your skin,
cross-stitch them on a sampler, broadcast them from highway
overpasses. Collectively they create a gorgeous, grisly universe
populated by suicidal young black Santa Clauses, old Yankee
warlocks, brown birds that nest in Texaco signs, insane medieval
kings, and cigarette-smoking ponies. Surreal and ruggedly
vernacular, Berman’s lyrics reveal the hallucinatory
strangeness of everyday experience and the unexpected banality of
the absurd. As the narrator of “I’m Getting Back into
Getting Back into You” acknowledges, “I’ve been
workin’ at the 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.” Tanglewood Numbers boasts so
many quotable quotes — “Time is a game only children
play well”; “The last dream left worth believing starts
with animal shapes”; “I saw God’s shadow on this world”
— that it’s tempting to just shut up, string a bunch of
them together, and let Berman tell his own slant truth. Unsurprisingly, the music is always secondary
on a Silver Jews album, but that’s OK. The Jews have always
been more a loose confederacy of friends than an actual band, and
Berman’s vocals, to put it kindly, are an acquired taste.
“All my favorite singers couldn’t sing,” he
admitted in a song on 1998’s American
Water, and his pitch-challenged
mentors would probably return the compliment. Solemn and broken,
Berman’s voice carries the tune in the same way an arthritic
pallbearer hoists a casket. Is he tone-deaf or tuned in to some
secret frequency? Either way, there’s something peculiarly
affecting in the contrast between his stumblebum baritone and his
lyrics, which are inhumanly fine. Secondary though it might be, the Silver
Jews’ music has never sounded more essential than it does
here. Stylistically, Tanglewood resides somewhere between the indie-rock sprawl of
American Water and the country & Western shamble of Bright Flight, with
songs that range from loopy country doo-wop to punishing art-punk
and neurasthenic folk. Berman’s wife, Cassie, provides
sweet-and-sour supporting vocals; original guitarist Stephen
Malkmus doles out saw-toothed riffage and needly counterpoint;
drummers Bob Nastanovich and Brian Kotzur alternate flickery,
pinging accents with brutal bastinado; and Paz Lenchantin
multitasks on banjo and violin. Overall, the sound is denser, less
desultory; the arrangements are artful but borderline chaotic, the
carefully wrought orchestrations stippled with a thin scurf of
noise. After a four-year recording hiatus marked by drug addiction,
depression, and a suicide attempt, Berman seems to have returned
with a new sense of urgency, a desire to pair his accessible
eloquence with less inaccessible accompaniment. Poetry
couldn’t hope for a better ambassador.
This article appears in Nov 17-23, 2005.
