Pitchfork

Given the short time it's taken David Berman of the Silver Jews to go from decidedly anti-show to bona fide road warrior, it's no real surprise that, once he gets going, there's not much use in trying to stop him.

The rather lean itinerary we posted a while back when we mentioned that Drag City had settled on a June 17 release for the Jews' sixth LP Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea was lean for a reason: they weren't done with it yet. Now, the family Berman will hit the UK and continental Europe through most of May, culminating in their performance at the Primavera Sound Festival in Barcelona.

The cover art that Berman talked about in our January interview with him has also been revealed, and it's pretty damn cool. Here's what Berman said about it:

"I really, really felt like the title and the ideas of the songs, the idea of me going out into the world instead of me looking in--all of it came together through the painting that I got to be the cover, which is by a guy named Stephen Bush who's an Australian painter. He's done this painting 27 times. Once a year, he paints it from memory with one tube of black and one tube of white. It's a painting of three elephants, you could say it's Babar, I'm not positive. For him, it's something to do with French colonialism. It's called 'The Lure of Paris'.

For me, it's great. There's this character, this hero, but he's an elephant. He's standing on a rock, the sea is very rough around him, there's amazing light coming down through the sky, and then there's the other elephants coming down a cliff on a rope. I thought for a minute that I wasn't going to be able to use it. It was so devastating that I didn't know what to do.

No other cover has ever... they've all been arbitrary, except for maybe Bright Flight. There's never really been any connection to what's under the cover. And this time, it's everything. Like, when you'd read a paperback when you were a kid, and you'd really like the characters, you'd look at the people on the cover and be like, 'Are these the people?' And you get older and you'd realize, 'Wait. This is a different artist.' And then you get older, and you realize there's no connection, the author doesn't need the artist, blah blah blah. This time, maybe they're all elephants."

05-07 Brighton, England - Concorde 2
05-08 Leeds, England - City Varities Music Hall
05-09 Glasgow, Scotland - ABC
05-10 Belfast, Northern Ireland - Black Box
05-11 Dundalk, Ireland - Spirit Store
05-14 Cork, Ireland - Cyprus Avenue
05-15 Galway, Ireland - Roisin Dubh
05-16 Dublin, Ireland - Whelan's
05-18 Minehead, England - Butlins Holiday Resort (Explosions in the Sky ATP)
05-20 Hamburg, Germany - Fabrik *
05-21 Berlin, Germany - Columbia Club *
05-22 Frankfurt, Germany - Brotfabrik *
05-23 St. Gallen, Switzerland - Palace Theatre *
05-25 Paris, France - Point Ephemere *
05-27 Manchester, England - The Dancehouse Theatre *
05-28 Liverpool, England - The Zanzibar Club
05-29 London, England - Indig02 *
05-30-31 Barcelona, Spain - Primavera Sound Festival

* with Monotonix