Silver Jews: Bright Flight : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Silver Jews' David Berman, holed up in Nashville by way of Virginia, stands tall among our nation's singer-songwriters: He's a veritable Timbaland of the spoken word, a wandering honky-tonk bard murmuring feverish, fractured one-liners in his handsome country-rock growl. So far, he's had more success in the U.K., where artists such as Badly Drawn Boy have built whole careers around imitating him, but he taps into ur-American rural nightmares on his fifth album, Bright Flight. Last time, Berman scored a bona fide masterpiece with 1998's American Water, with guitar support from Pavement's Stephen Malkmus, and followed it with his superb 1999 book of poetry, Actual Air. The new record is darker and messier than American Water, with members of Lambchop providing backup. Berman sings wittily of love ("They slow-danced so the needle wouldn't skip") and art ("We're gonna live in Nashville and I'll make a career/Out of writing sad songs and getting paid by the tear"), throwing in a deadpan cover of George Strait's "Friday Night Fever" for thematic unity. But Berman ends Bright Flight on a solemn note with the devastating "Death of an Heir of Sorrows," a country ballad mourning and cursing an old friend who died alone.

ROB SHEFFIELD
(RS 890 - February 28, 2002)