In the liner notes to the latest Silver Jews album, Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea, frontman Dave Berman asserts, almost self-deprecatingly, “anyone can play these songs.” He even graces the foldout with finger placement diagrams for each of the album’s 16 chords just to, uh, make certain. In more ways than one, Berman is an elbow-patched, chalk-speckled professor of rock music’s old skool: a lyrically focused song carpenter bent tirelessly over his work in a market saturated with half-musicians and doppelgangers slack-jawingly enamored with their own music’s neon hues and thematic vacuousness. The comparison is severely limited, yes, but consider this: whereas most bands flood the blog-iverse and intraweb with promotional MP3s and Myspace links, Berman exhorts his fans to spread his songs in the most tactile, traditional way conceivable—play them for others.

From the opening bars of Lookout opener “What Is Not But Could Be If,” the mandate looks every bit doable as Berman’s gravelly baritone rumbles with the authoritativeness and—pay attention—sing-ability of a Johnny Cash song. That this would be easy for any chump with a guitar to perform isn’t the main point here (though, hey, just four chords!), but its Spartan structure does allow Berman’s verses to hit harder than they ever could have over a busier backdrop. Each line lands like impregnable Truth before whisking by on a breeze of reverb-y guitar, much like that same tumbleweed that appears in every goddamned spaghetti western. And like that tumbleweed, Berman’s been traversing some scabby country:

What is not but could be if
We could be crossing this abridged abyss—into beginning
When failure’s got you in its grasp
And you’re reaching for your very last—it’s just beginning.

Most songs about rewinding your life or starting over are, at best, whimsical ruminations fit only for daytime television (and really, what isn’t?), but with Berman it’s downright scary. What if you were able to go back to the “beginning” only to realize that your fate is immutable and that now you have to relive that shit all over again? Not really the conversation you had in mind when your friend offered to play a great new song for you on the guitar. Pass the digital, please.

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