Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea

Sleeve

Released on June 17th 2008 by Drag City on CD and LP. Catalogue number DC358.

Tracklisting

Credits

Recorded at Marble Valley of Lexington, Virginia and Lake Fever Productions of Nashville, Tennessee, March 2007 - October 2007.

Reviews

Stereo Sanctity

From stereosanctity.blogspot.com

This year, I found myself devouring, internalising and generally clinging on to the Silver Jews back catalogue, much like a post-apocalyptic caveman who’s just discovered the bible. So it was with perfect timing that David Berman released one of his band’s strongest, and certainly their brightest, collections of songs to date, right on schedule to catch me at the height of my devotions. In a brief Q&A with Plan B magazine back in May, Berman said: “Touring gave me a good look at who I’d be speaking to when I wrote again. In the past I only had a blurry face to go on. What I saw was a lot of tender-hearted young people with little in the way of wisdom gained from harsh experience, leaving them vulnerable to the saturation and aftermath”. And indeed, his newfound confidence as a mentor to his listeners is obvious throughout ‘Lookout Mountain Lookout Sea’, as he steps boldly forward from the emotionally shaky foundations of 2005’s ‘comeback’ record ‘Tanglewood Numbers’, combining the gutter-bound wit of old with the infectious wisdom and musical perfectionism of a man born again, ready to share some lessons learned.

As with most truly great albums, this isn’t some epic attempt to paint a sprawling musical picture of the whole of life or something; it’s just thirty five minutes comprising ten carefully selected songs from the pile the band happened to have lying around, no more no less. Ten songs that, without wishing to overlook the band’s oft wondrous arrangements, any bum can recreate with a cracked voice and a handful of fingers; in fact a chord sheet and tabs are helpfully provided in the LP for that very purpose. But nonetheless, ten songs so densely packed with wit, wisdom, and crab-walking suburban profundity that their resonance will (I would like to think) echo long through the minds and hearts of the kind of people who listen to the words in songs and like to seek more songs with better words, long after Drag City has gone kaput in the face of the forthcoming dark age and the ‘Jews have retired to their poverty-stricken critical laurels.

I know I’ve used the words ‘wit’ and ‘wisdom’ twice in scarcely the space of a paragraph, but fuck it, wit and wisdom are what Silver Jews in 2008 are all about. Like every genius out there, Berman recognises that the funniest things and most serious things in life are one and the same, and, above all else, ‘Lookout Mountain..’ is uproariously entertaining. “San Francisco B.C.” has gotta be the most inspired long-form narrative song since the Velvets’ “The Gift” or Dylan’s “..

115th Dream”, highlighting the most graceful wrangling of a rhyming dictionary I’ve ever encountered, whilst “Aloysius, Bluegrass Drummer” and “Partybarge”, initially sounding like goofy, confounding joke-songs, reveal delightfully skewed depths on repeat spins. “Suffering Jukebox” could launch a rousing singalong in any hypothetical honkytonk of the soul, its central conceit still flat-out killer after hundreds of listens, whilst closer “We Could Be Looking For The Same Thing” would raise bittersweet tears from the same audience of imagined mountain men moments later – simply a straight-up, beautiful and wholly honest love song – no gimmicks, no jive, no spikes.‘Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea’ is one of those records, like Leonard Cohen or Richard Thompson used to make, like Jonathan Richman still does make, that is hugely enjoyable, but that teaches listeners something important at the same time, asking nothing in return. Edutainment for the soul. Quite what it’s teaching you exactly, I wouldn’t care to elaborate, that’s up to you to figure out, but let’s just say that if previous Silver Jews records were near-biblical masterpieces of self-pity, this one starts from the same square, but approaches the game with a hell of a lot more get up and go.(Oh, and best cover art of the DECADE also, I think.)”Somewhere in a foggy atlas
Lookout mountain, lookout sea
First life takes time, then time takes life
Now the next move’s up to me”Roll on 2009.

BBC

By Tim Nelson, 06 June 2008

The Silver Jews’ sixth album cover - wherein three stuffed Babar toys climb onto a rocky outcrop - mysteriously and trickily relates to the record’s tales of virtue gone to seed. But in 2008 what are the odds of ever seeing it? Since the likelihood is that most will simply download the best tracks for their mobiles, it’s best to forgo theoretical discussion about the gap between speech and song, in favour of an appreciation of the album’s country-rock attack, ethereal choruses and mosaic burr. Yes David Berman (along with wife Cassie) is back with yet another line-up in his journey along a road that’s long since ceased to be incorrectly termed ‘Pavement offshoot’.

Actually, Look Out Mountain, Look Out Sea is too varied an album to be called country, or rock, let alone country-rock. On the opener What Is Not But Could Be If, head songwriter Berman comes across like a latter-day psychedelicized Johnny Cash, throwing thoughts like tomahawks and quoting Yiddish wisdom. This urgent, apocalyptic mood continues on the shimmering alt-pop slabs of Suffering Jukebox and My Pillow Is A Threshold. But the album’s brilliance lies in its mix of approaches. There are the disturbing and arresting visions of Strange Victory, Strange Defeat and San Francisco B.C. (a distant relation of Dylan’s 115th Dream); the marimba delirium of Candy Jail and the ship’s horn and seagulls blasting on Party Barge. In addition, the naive chiming rendition of Japanese composer Maher Shalal Hash Baz’s Open Field offer a perspective upon Berman’s last-chance Texaco of lowlife insanity and romantic longing.

The man’s final triumph here lies in his lyrical vision, which goes beyond merely skewering a world of craven mediocrity to suggest better possibilities, where the end might just be another beginning. But rather than expound further on the Silver Jews’ new sympathy for unloved machine humanity, perhaps it’s enough to say that this is the best album to come out of Tennessee this year; indeed possibly the world. It even has a chord chart. So you really should get your own copy.

Pitchfork

Rating: 6.

7”In 1984, I was hospitalized for approaching perfection. ” As first lines of an album go, this one, the opening shot fired on Silver Jews’ 1998 album American Water, is among the greats, up there with Raw Power’s ”I’m a street-walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm” and Straight Outta Compton’s “You are now about to witness the strength of street knowledge. ” It’s an especially great line coming from Silver Jews’ David Berman because “perfection” as a concept has little place in his universe. In this landscape, flubbed notes exist alongside amazing guitar solos (when Berman’s buddy Stephen Malkmus is around, anyway), shirts are untucked, keys are more suggestions than rules, some of the best lyrics in rock history are interspersed with unapologetic groaners (I could kiss the guy who wrote, “Come to Tennessee/ ‘Cause you’re the only ten I see”) and characters are often flawed to the point of paralysis.

Perfection being what it is for Silver Jews, and Berman being so comfortable with that notion, it’s easy for fans to gloss over the rough patches. I have a feeling I’m not alone when I say that on every SJ record - save American Water, almost - I still skip around a bit. The nature of Silver Jews allows for inconsistent albums, even though the records appear infrequently. Two or three or four duff tracks on one record is nothing to get worked up about, and they may even add to the ramshackle charm. And so while Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea, the first Silver Jews album in almost three years, has the usual small handful of eh-to-just-OK tracks, it also feels different from prior Silver Jews albums in a way that’s hard to put a finger on.

Part of it could be the lack of knockout songs. There are no instant entries to the SJ canon, nothing here that knocks you on your ass, not a single “How did he write that? ” moment. And this problem is there from the beginning, the opening, where SJ have always killed: Where Tanglewood Numbers grabbed us by the throat with “Punks in the Beerlight” and The Natural Bridge turned a chair around and sat us down to explain “How to Rent a Room”, Lookout Mountain opens with the plodding and dull “What Is Not But Could Be If”. You feel like you just tripped and fell awkwardly into the album.

It doesn’t help that the production is oddly harsh and distant-sounding; where Berman sounds best clear and uncluttered, so that it seems like he’s engaging you in conversation, on this record his voice has a weirdly persistent metallic reverb clinging to it, like he’s broadcasting from inside a tin can and you’re straining to connect with him. Something about the sound makes him sound a bit uneasy, stiff, and a touch less confident. Busy Nashville producer Mark Nevers handled a chunk of the recording and all the mixing, and the warmth he’s been known to give albums by Lambchop, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, and the Clientele is missing here. Berman’s bassist and vocalist wife Cassie is, as she was on Tanglewood Numbers, far too high in the mix. There were some weird choices made in the studio.

I shouldn’t dwell on the production, since this band started out as the lo-ist of the lo-fi, recording white noise-packed songs on answering machines- and besides, you listen to Silver Jews for words. But an album that finds Berman in a more focused mode lyrically, writing lines that seem to straighten out some of his bent lyrical aesthetic, would do well to come with a more welcoming sound. In any event, there are still good songs with quotable lines here, thankfully, and the tunes throughout are solid. The lengthy, bouncy, Dylan-y “San Francisco B.C. “, in particular, is packed with lyrical nuggets: “We had sarcastic hair/ We used lude (sic) pseudonyms/ We got a lot of stares on the street back then” and “She said, ‘You don’t make enough to provide for me’/ I said, ‘What about the stuff that we- quote- believe?’” are two. (I love how you can picture the fingers in the air setting aside the word “believe. “)If the focus throughout seems to move away from stringing together rich, penetrating images, Berman is still skilled enough with words to make him do what he wants them to. The peppy, rushed “Aloysius, Bluegrass Drummer” is a surreal short story, with a title character who is a dishwasher at a restaurant “Open ‘til the end of time” and who falls for a girl “all strung-out on hard street fat. ” And then the weary countrified lament “Strange Victory, Strange Defeat”- which wonders about the “handsome grandsons in these rockband magazines” who have supplanted “the fat ones, the bald and the goateed”- works pretty well, even if the second half of the song doesn’t stick. The closing track, “We Could Be Looking for the Same Thing”- a cozy ballad that finds David duetting with Cassie- strips the lyrical flourishes back almost completely: Lines like “Where the days turn the weeks into months of the year” and ”I’ve been around some and I’ve seen enough to know/ We could spend happy lives, inside the days of you and me” could have been written by any number of singer-songwriters. That seems purposeful: Berman seems to have something specific that he wants to get across, and he’s OK saying it in what, for him, is a direct way.

With both Lookout Mountain and Tanglewood Numbers, there’s been discussion about these records being made after Berman’s time staring into the abyss, when he survived a suicide attempt, worked through a serious drug problem, got married, started touring, and generally got his shit together. So it’s tempting to hear some of the differences with this record - the tamer imagery, the more even keel, the highs that aren’t so high - as somehow mirroring the changes in Berman’s personal life. For me, though - since I never knew how tough Berman had it while enjoying his records up through Bright Flight, never had a clue as to depths of his suffering, and never heard his music in that context - it seems wrong to start thinking about such things now. Instead, I prefer to think of Lookout Mountain as an album of pretty-good songs from a guy who has written some unbelievably great ones, and will, more than likely, write some more of that quality down the road. There’s never been any kind of definable arc with the Silver Jews, no movement toward a fixed point; it’s more about keepin’ on keepin’ on. Once perfection is off the table, and you’re just doing the best you can with what you have, there will be moments like this.

Drowned in Sound

Rehab is a bitch. On the disjointed Tanglewood Numbers there’s an intimate understanding of an addict’s despair (“Let’s not kid ourselves, it gets really really bad”), an album which sags under the weight of facing a brave new world for the first time. Three years later, a presumably healthy David Berman has entered the honeymoon stage of sobriety, looks back on his drug and alcohol addiction through rose-tinted spectacles (‘Candy Jail’), and steps forward even if his legs are a bit wobbly yet.‘Suffering Jukebox’ acts as the most obvious metaphor for Berman’s well-documented personal tribulations. His matt-finish baritone croons, “While these seconds turn these minutes into hours of the day”, and with that comes the acceptance of a man who may not have completely put to rest the demons of his “chemical dependencies”, but he’s getting there. He’s resigned himself to the tendencies of those who’ve given up their bad habits to innocently contemplate the world’s adulation, or foolishly anticipate society to follow their inspired lead (“people in this town don’t want to know”). ‘Party Barge’ doesn’t allow Berman to trip into this malaise without a sense of humour. Wife Cassie chimes-in for the “Send us your coordinates / I’ll send a Saint Bernard” punch-line, a saving grace device which has probably kept the poor man from going over the edge. Nobody mixes mockery and mayhem in quite the same way.

Silver Jews’ latest collection of songs is more fully fleshed out than at any time in D.C. Berman’s storied past. This unexpected attention for detail has its trade-offs: ‘94’s Starlite Walker may very well have been the best jam session of half-formed ideas ever put to tape. In those days, conventional wisdom was the Joos were little more than an outlet for the Pavement boys and their agoraphobic college buddy to mess around in the basement. Today, there’s a good many people who’d reverse the emphasis. Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea swings the pendulum away from the Stephen Malkmus-infused indie rock of Tanglewood Numbers back to the alt-country favoured flair of ‘98’s American Water and Bright Flight of three years later.

If it’s not quite right to say this is a return to form after one less-than-stellar effort, Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea is a lot more fun for hearing Berman returning to his comfort zone. The pure dynamics of a countrified Silver Jews serves to put the spotlight on the lyrics, which isn’t a bad thing. His old friend, Stephen Malkmus, doesn’t appear here and if the music suffers from being sporadically uninspiring, it’s a distraction only until Berman delivers his next great line. Cassie Berman more than ably takes SM’s place for the oddball harmonies and bass guitar duties. Although she has popped up on SJ records before, the impression is Mr Berman has been grooming the missus for this moment, apparently coming to grips with her shortcomings as a musician. Frankly, I don’t know what Berman was worried about, as she always sounded pretty great to me.

The juxtaposition of malaise and jubilance which has been a hallmark of previous Silver Jews records is leavened here with wry commentary of his dysfunctional “family shadows”. If his sentiments oft precariously fall into the throwaway banalities category it’s Berman’s simple and heartfelt verse - “These doubles drive these dollars and the light of day away” - that makes all the difference.

Somewhere in the ‘90s, Berman sequestered himself in Tennessee, and his themes radiated outward from this observatory. Here, the songs are standalone vignettes which step out from the comfortable confines of Nashville and face the rigors of contemporary American life with an uncharacteristic wide-eyed enthusiasm, an underlying concept of triumph beyond tragedy across the entire album.

In much the same way the beauty of Mark Twain novels is the caustic wit which furrows beneath his Norman Rockwell stories, Berman’s scrutiny begs but doesn’t necessarily demand the listener to read between the lines. He is foremost a writer at heart, but unlike Twain the charm of his affable personality is that he really doesn’t give a shit. At its core, Silver Jews is a morality play told by a man who hasn’t been able to quite live up to common sense standards. Never mind being caught carrying “burglars’ tools”, he’s getting so close to redemption he can taste it. Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea is the logical next chapter in this manuscript which has had many of us hooked since the opening lines.

Glam Racket

“No I really don’t want to die/I only want to die in your eyes.”“How To Rent A Room” David Berman wrote those words a little more than a decade ago, and I was one of those that considered Berman’s most depressive period to be his best creatively. There was a certain amount of guilt with that, given the circumstances, as you never want someone to actually harm themselves just for the sake of your own record collection.

Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea is one of those “happy” David Berman albums, and one that I disliked the first time I heard it. But after seeing them live, I got a different perspective. The songs came off a lot less polished than on record and I could actually see Berman’s happiness. The interaction with other band members, the obvious love of his wife, and the energy that he fed off of from the audience.

A live setting and the sterile confines of the studio are two polar opposite locales. And if Lookout Mountain suffers from anything, it is the sterility. The sense of playfulness is occasionally lost and there are times when the lighthearted nature of the recording overshadows any hint of Berman’s wordy humor.

What a shame, as there are more than a few tracks that are slyly hilarious and one cut, “San Francisco B.C.,” which is one of the best songs Berman has ever written. In it, David creates a tale of criminal activity, infidelity, and mystery. It’s plot is as exciting as any screenplay and you’re glued to the proceedings like any good movie. Unfortunately, it’s not good enough to place Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea alongside such greats as American Water or The Natural Bridge. It is, however, good enough for me to consider Berman’s bright side and not get sad when he’s feeling so good.

Aquarium Drunkard

I had a friend introduce me to the Silver Jews in college. We shared a radio show together our freshman year and he would often pull out tracks from the American Water LP for the broadcast. But that was all I ever heard by them until 2006’s Tanglewood Numbers. With this limited exposure, and given the story of Berman’s bout with depression and time away from releasing output, Tanglewood seemed the perfect place to jump on. I’m glad I did. Not necessarily because of that album, though, but because of Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea, its follow up, and its better.

The tone of Lookout Mountain is immediately softer than its predecessor. Where “Punks in the Beerlight” had opened Tanglewood Numbers with a musically raucous but lyrically maudlin rocker, this album opens with “What Is Not But Could Be If,” a song that ruminates even as it sets the tone for moving forward across jangling guitars and hopeful insight. “My Pillow is the Threshold” is one of the albums darkest moments. “It’s a dark and snowy secret / and it has to do with heaven / and what looks like sleep / is really hot pursuit,” intones Berman in the first chorus. But the pause that this song gives is immediately offset by the fantastic “Strange Victory Strange Defeat,” one of the more sharp and lovely eviscerations of the music industry in some time.

Admittedly my knowledge of the Jews’ back catalogue is lacking, but some of the more surprising moments on the album are the tracks that recall the loose, silly and rollicking version of Bob Dylan that were often strewn across his early records. “Aloyisius Bluegrass Drummer” is a ridiculous tale of a dishwasher and his love for a rather gluttonous musician from some imaginary place called “Region 10.” “San Francisco B.C.” is the type of endlessly-detailed story that recalls “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” - it winds out and back around itself with references to “sarcastic haircuts” and characters that insist that “love is the douche of the bourgeoisie.” “Party Barge” similarly creates its own mythos, while undermining it all the same. “Why not see a legend while it’s still being made,” Berman calls out amidst fog horns, seagulls and urges from Cassie Berman to “send us your coordinates / I’ll send a Saint Bernard.” These tracks pepper the record with a loose feel that makes the harder moments sink in more effectively and even get you to start examining the goofier numbers for meaning as well.

Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea is a the epitome of well crafted modern art - its search for truth and progress takes it through moments both high and low, serious and silly, and comes out all the better for it on the other side. - j. neas

LA Weekly

By Randall Roberts

Published on June 11, 2008 at 12:41pmIn “San Francisco B.C.,” the centerpiece of the Silver Jews’ new Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea, a protagonist and his girlfriend, whose first words upon their meeting were “romance is the douche of the bourgeoisie,” get involved in a misadventure. Over the next six minutes, lead Jew David Berman spins an oddball yarn with shocking depth and efficiency, each line crafted to serve both the story and the song. Like the great dramatic monologues and dialogues of the past half century (“Teddy Bear” by Red Sovine, Bob Dylan’s “Idiot Wind,” “Pancho and Lefty” by Townes Van Zandt and “Bridges and Balloons” by Joanna Newsom), the song creates a world and fills it with narrative. “San Francisco B.C.” features a ne’er-do-well narrator and his vegan girlfriend. Her dad’s a barber with portentous shakes, and they get tangled up in a murder with a man named Mr. Games, who has “jeweler’s hands and a blurry face.” Countless epic lines and verses follow. We learn about a burglary of “children’s fur coats and diamonds and jewels,” a brawl (or, as Berman calls it, “fist cuisine”) with Mr. Games’ stepson Gene, love and betrayal and curlicue twists and turns both plotwise and guitarwise, all carried along by the chug-chug-chug of a song that blends Charlie Daniels and Charlie Rich with a dollop of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea is the sixth, and best, full-length release by Silver Jews, Berman’s two-decade-long project, which he’s gradually transformed from a Pavement-infused guitar band (Stephen Malkmus was an early member) to a crystal-clear country-rock concern, with twang and torch, piano flourishes, the occasional church organ and an ever-present drive. It was produced in Nashville, Berman’s home, by Mark Nevers, who himself has carved out a secret little corner of the country-music capital by overseeing beautiful albums by Lambchop, Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Calexico — as well as engineering everyone from Marie Osmond and Etta James to George Jones and Johnny Cash.

And it’s Cash’s voice that Berman’s most closely resembles. Except Berman’s is flatter, and any extended rave on his lyrical expertise must contain this proverbial asterisk: His is a punctured tire of a voice, with a sad-sack style that suggests an insurance salesman with a stuffy nose more than it does the Man in Black. It’s droll and it’s rough, but it pushes, it moves, it travels where Berman wants it to, or nearly. It’s singing as necessity, and God bless him for putting it out there. The good thing is that Berman’s wife, Cassie Berman, is the perfect foil, and her harmonies on “Open Field” and “Suffering Jukebox” help balance the tones.

Of course, the best way to appreciate the joys of Berman is to focus on the words, because he’s the best lyricist out there. His only book of poetry, Actual Air, remains a steady seller nearly a decade after its original publication, and Berman counts among his admirers both the former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins and Pulitzer Prize winner James Tate. Like his verse, Berman’s songs draw on an odd assortment of fascinations: early American presidents; civil servants; bars and their oft-sad clientele; Minnie Pearl; and “squirrels imported from Connecticut just in time for fall” (Berman’s a little squirrel-obsessed, in fact). And, more and more, questions of faith, as in the album’s opener, “What Is Not but Could Be If,” in which he declares, in the resonant voice of a 19th-century senator: “The truth is not alive or dead/The truth is struggling to be said.”Berman’s songs tell stories so rich and dynamic that they make the extended narratives of Bob Dylan story-songs sound sloppy and unfocused (which, admit it, they often are). Take, for example, the first couplet of the joyous, left-field anthem “Party Barge”: “Father drove a steamroller/Momma was a crossing guard/She got rolled when he got steamed/and I got left in charge.”What does our narrator do with his freedom? “Living in this little town with my pedigree in shards/I chopped down a weeping-willow tree and built this party barge.”(Of course.) What follows is a celebratory rock song replete with the sound of towboat horns, squeaking seagulls, driving guitar riffs and, at its climax, Cassie Berman as a dispatcher reassuring the now-lost barge pilot to “send us your coordinates, I’ll send a Saint Bernard.”The best song on the album, “Suffering Jukebox,” is also the most traditionally structured. It manages to profile in its lines a lonely, unplayed jukebox in the corner of a smoky bar, and metaphorically connects it to the plight of the working musician. “They always seem to keep you way down low,” sings Cassie, “the people in this town don’t want to know.” Berman tries to understand in this perfect chorus:Well, all that mad misery must make it seem true to you. But money lights your world up. You’re trapped. What can you do? You got Tennessee tendencies and chemical dependencies. You make the same old jokes and malaprops on cue.”Suffering jukebox in a happy town,” mourns Cassie, finally. “You’re over in the corner breaking down,” and on we go, through the world that Berman and band have created, one that overflows with a sense of profound joy at capturing in lyrics and song the beauty of creativity, and, by extension, honoring the unknowable Other from which it is born.

Spacelab

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”.