Silver Jews – ‘American Water’
American Water is an album that triumphs in the task that indie music sets for any alternative artist—it colours and brightens the everyday drudgery and despondency we face as just-about-outsiders with such consummate laissez-faire humour and poetry that you’re almost gladdened for the pitfalls of life. In this case, thanks to how painlessly those pesky potholes can be paved over with the same punchlines they helped to spawn. In his art with the Silver Jews, David Berman approached problems like a game of whack-a-mole—they pop up, and he’d make swatting them away a bit of fun. American Water is an act of reconciling woes and whisking them away on a melodious riff.
The opening track, ‘Random Rules’, is the perfect introduction to that. It’s Berman proclaiming that adult life is chaos, and I’m struggling to cope with that but saying it out loud with a wry smile sure helps. In that act, there is a sense of acceptance—and with acceptance comes the final quandary: if random rules, then is it so random after all? As Berman said himself: “Now I question later on whether things were random.”
With drug troubles entering the mix, alongside the desire to get clean and have “fun” making records like “other people”, that underpinning awareness that Berman might be the chief orchestrator of the random chaos ruling his roost rumbles his best-laid plans throughout. He might mean to wallow in certain moments or berate the universe for his disposition, but he quickly realises that the sad truth is it is simply too easy for people to make a perfectly honest mistake. He is one of those people in the midst of one of those mistakes. And so, he has written a record with solidarity for his fellow ne’er-do-wells and hard-luck holsters at its core.
This makes for an album not far from a musical equivalent of a Coen brothers film, a sort of comic farce that encapsulates far more of life than anything one-track in its telling. There are spots of despair in the welter, but you’re never that far from ‘Night Society’ – an instrumental rock out asserting a bit of escapist catharsis. There are sad lines like “hide all my pain”, but these are quickly followed by a funny punchline. There is also casual dissonance in the grotty guitars as though the music has suddenly slipped into a hangover, but soon it’s feeling the sun on its face again, and prettiness is the riffing order of the day.
It is this that makes applying a genre to it particularly pointless. It’s just a band rattling off fitting tunes for a guy sincerely grappling with his life. When things get profound on ‘The Wild Kindness’ the rhythm gets brooding, and bass pushes the melody along, but things get scraggy, and garage guitars lead the maudlin march of the apathetic opening to ‘Buckingham Rabbit’ before Berman finds the poetry in his downfall and offers up a piano flourished chorus.
The most definitive moment on the record comes at the start though, through the simple chanted chorus of ‘Smith & Jones Forever’. These queer characters somehow seem oddly known to us despite the song diverging very little about them. This is because while there might be strange little specificities, Smith & Jones are just generic folks out there in the world representing the tarnished distance between ideals and reality. They are flawed, the song is flawed, and, ultimately, American Waters is flawed, and it is all the more perfect as a result of that.
So, while American Water might be deeply personal to Berman’s situation and the life that led him there, he makes it ours to share and relate to in the lightest way possible. And he does that by embracing tragedy with such comic pathos that your cares are hugged away while the humorous quips and invigorating music are warmly saying, ‘Come on, let’s get you a pint’.
