David Berman's band suffers from an image problem. People are confused by the name, The Silver Jews (a reference to The Silver Apples and slang for Jewish people with blonde hair). Moreover, the music press seems convinced that they're a side project of influential indie-rockers, Pavement. True, Berman created The Silver Jews with friends and Pavement members Stephen Malkmus and Bob Nastanovich. But the personal, alt-country sound that came from The Jews was all Berman's own.
On "Bright Flight," The Jews' new album on Drag City, neither hide nor hair of Malkmus and Nastanovich can be found. But the sound returns to the warped, backwoods-blues of earlier albums they recorded together. "Bright Flight" is a last call at the honky-tonk. It's a lazy serenade after a whiskey-soaked afternoon.
Berman's lyrics are both literate and ludicrous, but with the same desolate, heart-broken air of 1940s country and western. For example, in the song, "Room Games and Diamond Rain," he laments: "A freight train rattles the chandelier/And we're like plug-in reindeer/whose cords can't stretch far enough to fly."