When David Berman was in New York this past spring recording the new Silver Jews album, American Water, he could be found almost any night of the week talking emphatically about something he cqalled the 'New Openness". Part self-help, part spiritual agenda, part cocktail party schtick, the new openness is a kind of deliberately audacious honesty that allows us to say exactly what we are feeling at any given moment. It shows up everywhere on American Water : "It is Autumn and my camouflage is dying", "I feel insane when you get in my bed", "Is the problem that we can't see, or is it that the problem is beautiful to me?"

American Water is adult music, a grown man's music, and on every track it's haunting with the confidence and apprehension of someone who has passed out in shadows and woken up under a flourescent glare. Bucolic and beleaguered, the album stands up with and assuredness and weary charisma that is a rare commodity in music these days and chilling to be near. The trapdoors and back alleys of personality that give dimension to Berman's songs are by turns scary, reassuring, and eerily familiar. In 'Like like the the the Death' he sings, "My life at home everyday / drinking coke in a kitchen with a dog who doesn't know his name / Oh right / it could have been anyone / grass, rabbits, grass, rabbits, grass."

Even if it's an elaborate ruse, the New Openness cuts right to the quick - something that might be said of American Water and the Silver Jews in general (granted the cutting may be more of a hunting, and the quick no more than a blur of personal contingency). A thrust of Silver Jews has always been to stir up the garbage of recieved emotions that makes most pop music a landfill of cop-outs.

Comfortable with neither the bland expressionism of indie rock nor the platitudes of country music, Berman throws himself into the huge and obscure divide that yawns out below the typically American struggle to reconcile the mythic with the everyday. It's not enough to say that the Silver Jews sing about the small-time lives of rotten suburbs or the mundanities of growing older with only culture-addled no-sense of your-self.

What's important in the Silver Jews music is the vortex of consequences - psychic or otherwise - that takes its toll whenever we try to have a good look at ourselves. Neither good lives nor bad lives are easy, and it's something extraordinary just to see a mirror for what it is.

Punctuated by Steve Malkmus' stoned guitar twang and occasional singing, Berman's baritone lyrics have a mid-thought seductiveness that is reminiscent of Dylan and Mayo Thompson, or John Phillips and Skip Pence - all od whom are experts at drawing in a audience with one hand and turning them back into the forest with the other. To his credit though, Berman seems to have had enough with wilful misdirection. A life of walking in circles will make one value steadfastness, if nothing else "I'm gonna shine out in the wild kindness" he sings on American Water's last, most poignant track "and spurn the sin of giving in." How much longer must we inhabit this divine fork-in-the-road? Until we recognise the footprints trailing off behind us as our own.