Cowboy Sadness: Selected Jambient Works Vol. 1 Album Review

Selected Jambient Works Vol. 1 opens with the slow grace of a sunrise. A low drone shimmers into view, joined moments later by the reedy hum of a Farfisa. Synth chords billow, tinged with rich delay, pushing glittering harmonics to the edges of the stereo field. After four delicate minutes, the elements dissipate like clouds and you realize that vast expanse of tone has captured your attention without overtly commanding it. Over the next nine songs, the trio of David Moore (Bing & Ruth), Peter Silberman (The Antlers), and Nicholas Principe (Port St. Willow) repeat and refine that slow-blooming approach, composing enormous, enveloping ambient panoramas that take up the entire screen.

The journey to Selected Jambient Works began in 2011, when a mutual friend introduced Moore to fellow Brooklyn musicians Silberman and Principe. All three trafficked in similar territory, occupying various overlapping points of the ambient, drone, and pop Venn diagram. They began to develop a shared musical vocabulary, recording marathon jam sessions on a handheld recorder. By 2017, all three had decamped to upstate New York, trading their cramped outer-borough neighborhoods for the wilderness of the Catskill Mountains. With Principe at the helm, the trio took the 20-plus hours of recordings they’d made between 2017 and 2021 and whittled them into a succinct 58 minutes of cosmic minimalism and wooly post-rock.

These songs are huge, to be sure—Principe and Silberman’s synthesizers stretch into infinity and Moore’s transistor organs shudder like tuning forks in a silo—but the spaciousness comes from the deft restraint each musician exhibits. The band makes ample use of reverb and echo but never relies on them as a crutch to create its expansive sound. “Billings, MT” builds into a velvety groove with Principe’s brushed drums galloping next to Moore’s cyclical Rhodes figure, a gauzy hum wafting in the background. Two thirds of the way through, Silberman introduces a sparse baritone guitar line, suddenly giving the track new depth. “Ten Paces” has a similar blueprint, with Silberman’s spare guitar and Moore’s Rhodes drifting through a foggy synth chord, dancing around Principe’s steady but unpredictable drum hits.

Cowboy Sadness’ songs can initially feel airy and languid; their unhurried tempos and hazy atmosphere have a calm, almost heavy-lidded vibe. Yet lurking beneath the bucolic air is a slightly ominous quality, a shadow that doesn’t move with the sun. Synthetic strings slowly cocoon around the distorted melody at the center of “Full Mammoth” but allow spiky textures to peek out from the silken webbing. An anxious tremolo runs through “Starcharger,” speeding as the song presses on, gathering up blistering noise like a blade running over gravel. The band describes Selected Jambient Works as “the sound of the desert,” and the press materials mention patches of succulents, towering plateaus, and red-orange sunlight—all suitable reference points for the sweeping music found on the record. What makes Selected Jambient Works so remarkable, however, isn’t its ability to conjure images of the endless West, but rather the existential melancholy it conveys. The musicians of Cowboy Sadness understand that to grasp enormity, you must first acknowledge the smallest details; the farther you can see, they seem to suggest, the smaller you’ll feel.