Pitchfork: Silver Jews Album Details Revealed

It's finally time for the first Silver Jews album since 2001's Bright Flight. According to Billboard, the new album is called Tanglewood Numbers and is planned for an October 18 release. Not surprisingly, we will once again see the Silver Jews taking on country-tinted rockers, slacker ballads, and more raucous workouts; in typical self-deprecating style, main Jew David Berman spoke of the album thusly to the music trade paper: "For the first time, I am really happy with the record in the sense that I will listen to it without it being a painful experience. In my mind, this is a hard rock record. The last one was more of a vocal record. With my limited voice, my reaction to displaying it is that it's necessary to put it right out front and not hide it. But on this record, it's a rock record, so I thought the voice would become more of an instrument."

It's fortunate that the album exists at all. After engineer Mark Nevers and Berman clashed over the musical direction of the album, Nevers was going to throw the masters in the Cumberland River. Then, on March 2, the Easley McCain Recording Studio in Memphis suffered an electrical fire that razed the famous studio; the tapes were delivered there the very morning of the fire, but luckily had been stored in another part of the building untouched by the flames. Barring further catastrophe, Tanglewood's tracklist:

01 Punks in the Beerlight
02 Sometimes a Pony Gets Depressed
03 K-Hole
04 Animal Shapes
05 Getting Back Into Getting Back Into You
06 How Can I Love You (If You Won't Lie Down?)
07 The Poor, the Fair, and the Good
08 Sleeping Is the Only Love
09 The Farmer's Hotel
10 There Is a Place

Tanglewood Numbers sees sometime members Stephen Malkmus and Bob Nastanovich returning to the fold after taking a break from the last album. Other contributors include Drag City labelmate Will Oldham, past helper Mike Fellows, Bobby Bare Jr., Paz Lenchantin (A Perfect Circle), Duane Denison (Jesus Lizard), and, providing vocals on a number of tracks, Berman's wife Cassie.

So, you ask, what now? Well, in addition to working on ideas for the follow up to his 1999 book of poetry, Actual Air, Berman is going to try to get his head around all the unreleased early Silver Jews tapes in order to issue some sort of collection. "I have hundreds of tapes of me, Bob and [Malkmus], but I've been real reluctant to go through them. Each one is 45 minutes long and we would just kind of let the thing run and make up songs for that night. It's like the Library of Congress."

* Billboard.com: http://www.billboard.com/bb/daily/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000974794
href="http://pitchforkmedia.com/record-reviews/s/silver-jews/bright-flight.shtml">Silver Jews: Bright Flight
href="http://pitchforkmedia.com/news-03/08.shtml">Silver Jews Album Saved From Studio Fire!
* Silver Jews fan page: <a

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