Drag City To Release Early Silver Jews Compilation

Silver Jews fans haven't had much to get excited about since their sudden breakup in 2009.  Well, we can cheer up a little as Drag City is offering up quite the treat.  They are releasing an album called Early Times and will feature tracks from the early days and now out of print 7"s and 12" EPs.  This was a particularly special time for David Berman because he was working closely and leaving full song  phone messages with Stephen Malkmus, which appeared on his first 7", Dime Map Of The Reef.  All these songs and more will be included and as a huge fan of the Silver Jews, this news has made my week.

Press Release:

SILVER JEWS TO RELEASE EARLY TIMES JUNE 19TH ON DRAG CITY

Flow on, silver juice, flow on…into the vein-streams of the nu generation via 90s classics like American Water and Starlite Walker and thence to the new century. How many lifetimes have we lived since the salad days and nightz of the original Silver Jews, when they walked the back-alleys of the earth just a scant couple decades ago? Who knows how many fans of the arena-rock Silver Jews (circa Tanglewood Numbers and Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea) even know of the humble-yet-powerful origins of the band captured in the hiss-laden boombox mics of 1990-91?

Just a few guys in a room, that’s what makes these recordings comprising Early Times: muppet baby versions of the David Berman, Stephen Malkmus and Bobby Nastanovich that we know today. There wasn’t much going on back then, though we’d hardly call it nothing. Still, these young post-collegiates were footloose and fancy-free, to say the least - working day-jobs with all the impermanence that implies – and not just working for the weekend, but trying to live the weekend every day of the week! Tough guys at a party; quick studies, quicker still with the wit. Legends of their own minds . . . prophets even. The stupid little laws they broke. The archaic little drugs they took. Those endless nights-into-dawns. All these things that might not hardly mean anything anymore added up to make these songs, to make these moments in a room, captured so incredibly imperfectly! The air is still locked inside them; the space in the room has depth and definition, defying all laws of audio science. Now these moments feel like they’ll last for centuries, growing stranger all through time. 

The songs lodged here on Early Times are the tracks from the original 7” EP “Dime Map of the Reef” and the 12” EP “The Arizona Record,” documenting the telepathic counter-intuition between these singers who went into such specific different directions later in life.

Silver Jews’ Early Times is available June 19th on Drag City Records.

Early Times Track Listing

01. Canada

02. The Walnut Falcon

03. September 1999

04. SVM F.T. TROOPS

05. THE Unchained Melody

06. Secret Knowledge of Back Roads

07. I Love the Rights

08. Jackson Nightz

09. The War in Apartment 1812

10. West S

11. You Can't Trust It To Remain

12. The Wild Palms

13. Welcome to the House of the Bats

14. Bar Scene from Stars Wars