"What's with all the handsome grandsons in these rock band magazines?" sings Nashville songwriter David Berman. "What have they done with the fat ones, the bald and the goateed?" Silver Jews have been repping the latter crowd since their first cuts with members of Pavement in the early '90s, but only recently has Berman seemed comfortable showing his face, deciding to ditch his no-touring policy after 2005's Tanglewood Numbers. While that bleakly catchy record was the tortured product of Berman's substance abuse, Silver Jews' latest is a more narrative-driven affair, full of yarns about a barber's daughter in San Francisco, a "Candy Jail" prisoner in Ft. Lauderdale and "a no-wave singer for a country band." The wordplay remains sharp, the characters as vivid as they are eccentric, but only "Strange Victory, Strange Defeat," the one about the handsome grandsons, can stand next to Silver Jews' career highlights: Starlite Walker, American Water and Bright Flight. Definitely not a defeat -- Berman is still standing, after all -- Lookout Mountain is an odd, modest victory.

-- Marc Hogan