New York singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Peter Silberman, joined by drummer Michael Lerner, returns with a supremely stripped back, soothingly soft in sound, minimalist release of quietly sung numbers, but with a hard-hitting, serious subject – contemplating our passively destructive tendencies of absent-minded pollution, unwitting wastefulness, and the inadvertent devastation of the natural world. The album was recorded over a space of three years, mostly in Silberman’s home studio in upstate New York, a compact outbuilding perched at the edge of a neighbour’s sprawling hayfield. “So much of the record was conceived while walking these massive fields,” he says. “I felt like I was wandering around an abandoned planet.” That sense of space, as well as his personal history of hearing loss in 2015, but happily later regaining it, as well as having vocal cord surgery, is expressed in the delicious sensitivity and subtlety of delivery and sparseness of sound, sometimes barely more than a whisper. This is an album that expresses itself in subject matter and style with a soft tread. Opener Consider the Source has exposed piano chords and a smooth, steady backbeat, and lays out a soulful confession of careless consumption, an awakening to ubiquitous “broken cords”, “takeout trays”, and the numerous byproducts of modern life, pointedly asking, “Is it enough to add to cart with buyer’s remorse?” Something In the Air is an exquisitely tender piano and vocal performance. But while there is subtlety, there is also – albeit gentle – directness. On Calamity, he asks point-blank: “Who will look after what we leave behind?” And on Carnage, with opening stark, distorted keyboard chords, comes this tragic, vivid image: “Off the side of the road / Branches trimmed and grasses mowed / There is a snake with his head disposed / Toad hops out of the briar / And underneath my spinning tyre / There he remains emulsifier.” Powerful simplicity is personified in a small but profound scene in a song that then bursts profoundly out into a more expansive melancholy with electric guitar soloing, keyboards and drums. The penultimate track, A Great Flood, looks into a possibly bleak future, in which Silberman wonders: “Of this I'm uncertain/ Will we be forgiven?/ Should there come a great flood/ To drown out our decisions?” The creative less-is-more approach has rarely been more powerfully exposed than with this profoundly sad but beautiful release. Out on Transgressive Records.
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