Best Silver Jews Album (1 Viewer)

[billygannon]

I am also in the Natural Bridge camp. American Water is excellent, so it Starlite Walker.

Have yet to listen to the later stuff. I'll do that, over coffee, on Sunday - looking out over the rooftops of Shepherd's Bush.

 

[Unknown Convict]

no way man
the same shit happened to me in Freebird a couple of times in the late 1980s before I got to know people there. Run up to the ATM on O'Connell St and some prick would have bought the record in the meantime.

Dead Can Dance - The Garden Of Arcane Delights 12"
My Bloody Valentine - Ecstasy LP

Remember seeing REM's Chronic Town in Virgin megastore just after the place opened. Hadn't enough cash but was meeting my mother for lunch so planned on getting it in the afternoon.

Went back and some cunt and ripped the entire front sleeve off.

they need to get atms in record shops. then we'd all be broke!

coincidentally i got one of my copies of chronic town in virgin, but probably a bit after the opening.

people who rip covers off are cunts for sure, but people who beat us to a purchase can't be pricks, just lucky! how do you know you never did the same to someone else?!!

 

[talisman]

its gotta be natural bridge, wholesale!

 

[billygannon]

I'm glad that the Natural Bridge has been decided upon as the best Silver Jews album.
I think the people who said Starlite Walker and American Water should admit to their mistake and now agree that their second album is their best work.

 

[nlgbbbblth]

they need to get atms in record shops. then we'd all be broke!

coincidentally i got one of my copies of chronic town in virgin, but probably a bit after the opening.

people who rip covers off are cunts for sure, but people who beat us to a purchase can't be pricks, just lucky! how do you know you never did the same to someone else?!!

It's not too bad now - at least plastic helps.
Prolly did the same to other people over the years alright. Although in those days (before I came to Dublin to live: pre - 1991) record shopping was a major event that happened every six weeks or thereabouts - so it was all or nothing. If someone got in ahead of me I regretted it the whole bus journey home to New Ross.

 

[jimmybreeze]

Id definately have to go with Natural Bridge,love it.
Not a bad album from them tho.|..|

 

[coast to coast]

In nineteen eight four....

 

[potlatch]

I'll stick me neck out here and say Tanglewood Numbers. Maybe it's not so good lyrically in places, but sounds amazinger each time the louder you play it.

 

[Jim Daniels]

This is kind of sad.

Chris Stroffolino - Griffith Park

Piano Van

Chris Stroffolino is a former Silver Jew who moved to Los Angeles and found himself without a permanent home, living out of a 1983 Ford Econoline van in which he’d fitted an upright piano (the now famous “Piano Van”). He’s led a strange life; he’s a bright guy – a musician, a scholar with a Ph.D in Shakespearian studies and a published poet - but he was playing the piano for tips in order to survive, which is how Jeff Feuerzeig (the filmmaker responsible for The Devil And Daniel Johnston) discovered him.

These 13 tracks were all recorded in the van in Griffith Park, Los Angeles. It’s rawness and depth of personalisation make it a form of outsider art, with clear echoes of Daniel Johnston and also the emotionally bare moments of Alex Chilton. Each song bar one is vocal and piano, which gives the album an intimate, heartfelt, philosophical, melancholic feel. ‘Vida Guerra’, which adds simple drums to the thumping piano, is a pleasant surprise and feels like a band by comparison. Otherwise, lyrics rotate between the romantic, the lost and the literate, with clever words – “I guess we’re too nostalgic, nostalgic for a time before we were even born” (‘Eyes of the Dead’) – and a scarred voice. Stroffolino produces a great version of Richard Hell’s ‘Time’ (apparently he runs to a 1000 song repertoire of covers), and his own ‘Equal Love’ has delicate piano playing while ‘Make It Rain’ is Johnston-like outsider-ism.

The Piano Van is currently laid up in Oregon where Stroffolino next went for a job that didn’t pan out but what’s attractive for the listener is that this is more than a man playing piano; his backstory - like Daniel Johnston’s - audibly feeds into his music, to intrigue and entice a listener who wants authenticity. Jeff Feuerzeig was the first to succumb, but won’t be the last.

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