By: Jeff Hassay

David Berman’s sixth album as The Silver Jews, Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea, trades in his previous alt-country sound for a newer bat-shit crazy one. Crazy, but never menacing or chaotic, never punk or noisy. It is focused but unpredictable, like a curve ball thrown by a smirking pitcher that hits the batter in the crotch. Did he mean to do that? He isn’t telling.

Berman still reigns as the southern, literary, and acrobatic version of Leonard Cohen. Lookout Mountain somehow maintains a tone of Dr.-Strangelove-like lighthearted doom. In lesser hands it would come off as pretentious and confused, but it works here as a rethinking of classic rock mixed with a 90s college band (Pavement?) playing a long-lost Dr. Seuss children’s album.

Straddling the line between darkness and humor is nothing new for the Silver Jews. They have always maintained a playful tone in their songs, sometimes to the fault of the song (see "Rebel Jew" or "Honk if You’re Lonely"). What they do here is constantly bob and weave from high to low, from candy jail and a party barge to a suffering jukebox and a “dark and snowy secret”. Animals also appear frequently, from the Babar-esque elephant on the album’s cover to squirrels, a cobra, and a Saint Bernard. These, along with Berman’s persistent poetic-slash-comedic ability to turn a phrase, make Lookout Mountain into something like a psychedelic fairytale filled with elusive morals, “Tennessee tendencies, chemical dependency”, and the “same old jokes and malapropos” (it rhymes in the song).

Berman’s playful absurdity and conscious move from the country vibe in the last few albums may seem like a step back from Tanglewood Numbers, the Silver Jews’ stellar previous album which, Berman wasn’t shy to admit, came after some hard times (drug addiction and a suicide attempt). While Tanglewood had light moments, it had many more thunderingly serious images and themes, ending in a place “past the blues”, with an apocalyptic suicide while seeing God’s scary shadow darken the world. Berman’s followup reminds me a bit of Steinbeck's Cannery Row: when it was released a few years after Steinbeck's dark classic The Grapes of Wrath, some people saw it as a minor work, one critic calling the book a creampuff. Steinbeck said that one needed to realize it was a "poisoned creampuff". Perhaps Lookout Mountain is Berman's "poisoned creampuff".

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