Free Music Monday Silver Jews Secret Knowledge of Back Roads

It took a long time for the world to twig that the Silver Jews weren't some Pavement side-project, but the vision of poet/mystic/philosopher David Berman. Early Times heads back to the source of that initial confusion; the newly-assembled compilation (due for imminent dispatch via the Drag City Empire) gathering the tracks from the 1990 seven-inch "Dime Map of the Reef," and the 1993 12-inch EP, The Arizona Record.

The elegant storytelling and country licks that'd come to define latter-day Joos —from roughly American Water on— are absent in "Secret Knowledge of Back Roads," which finds Berman and Stephen Malkmus riffing together on a primitive song recorded in ultra-primitive technology.

The sizzle of tape-hiss, clatter of percussion, and scratchy electrics guitars are reminiscent of Pavement's own pre-LP efforts; and Malkmus' voice pushes past Berman's. The lyrics are sing-song-ish —"kick the can/then you kicked the sand/kicked it in the face of another man"— and certainly won't be mistaken for "Smith and Jones Forever" anytime soon.

But Early Times is hardly supposed to be about polish; about the finished product. It's the earliest of tentative sketches that barely even suggest all that came thereafter, and listening to them knowing all that would is like some oddball form of time-travel eavesdropping.

Silver Jews, "Secret Knowledge of Back Roads"