Cowboy Sadness is comprised of guitarist Peter Silberman of The Antlers, drummer Nicholas Principe of Port St. Willow, and keyboardist David Moore of Bing & Ruth (and his recent, well-received collaboration with Steve Gunn). I can’t shake the feeling that this is, at least in part, a piss-take. Cowboy Sadness is a hilariously on-the-nose name for an ambient country project, and an implicit skewering of a genre that sometimes gets a little cheerless in its high lonesome drift. Titling their debut Selected Jambient Works, Vol. 1 makes it, somehow, even funnier.
And naming tracks “First Rodeo” and “Second Rodeo” seems like even more winking, since this is hardly the first rodeo (or second, for that matter) for the New York indie lifers that make up the outfit.