CAMBRIDGE--In a sea of dark glasses and beards, the crowd parts as David Berman, singer/songwriter of Silver Jews, lanky bard of the post-modern man, makes his way toward the front stage, guitar strapped across his back. The crowd, ever self-aware but tonight eager like children on a holiday, reverberates excitedly in his wake. The band, often mislabeled as a "Pavement side-project," is back from a four-year hiatus for their eighth performance ever, with the addition of Berman's wife, Cassie, on bass. It's Sunday night in Central Square, in the basement of The Middle East and the normally personal quality of Silver Jews' wit becomes communal, proving in subtlety and sui generis poetry that Berman is a king.

If fans were expecting the rock performance of a lifetime last Sunday, they quickly adjusted their expectations; the man moonlights as a poet. Which is to say, he placed his lyrics on a music stand and his between-song banter added up to not much more than a bad joke and a promise that he'll be back next year. But an aura radiated around Berman. Call it enlightened, rehabilitated or nearly Dylanesque, but from wherever it harkened, it delivered exactly what the audience unknowingly wanted.

Beginning with "Animal Shapes" from last year's Tanglewood Numbers, the band played for about an hour to a crowd whose energy was palpable (a 'communal effervescence' as a friend called it). While the album, best described as 1970s California country rock, lacked the catchy cache of righteousness in past albums like American Water or Starlite Walker, it was not unlikable on stage. Cassie was captivatingly beautiful and proficient on the bass, though her own material feels dry and not on par with Berman's shrewd songwriting.

The new material was complemented by an abundance of Silver Jews classics like "Random Rules," "Smith and Jones Forever," "Buckingham Rabbit" and "Trains Across the Sea." It was in this light-slightly harsh for a man who deals with fame and its accoutrements like a normal person-that Berman shone.

His diction was impeccable; his word play was uncanny and spot-on. If "song is being," as the poet Rainer Maria Rilke put it, then Berman's brand examined being as song, and a beautifully crafted song at that. He displayed a dedication to discernment often lacking in today's media-saturated environment, capturing the individual and his sand castle-civilizations in "People":

"People ask people to watch their scotch/ People send people up to the moon/ When they return, well there isn't much/ People be careful not to crest too soon."

This is why the landscape that Berman has parceled out might seem so appealing to our generation. He represents ambiguity incarnate; he simultaneously poeticizes and berates. His fodder for the flame lights equally on public excesses and personal deficiencies; "suburban kids with biblical names' epitomized in an air suffused with the sweet stench of 'midnight executions'." The truth behind his irony was barely concealed in the opening line to "Random Rules:" "In 1984 I was hospitalized for approaching perfection." An intimate performance, reaffirming that wit always wins, may have been just what the doctor ordered.