The Antlers - Hospice

My Old Kentucky Blog — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 14:50:00 +0000

Allow me to forge a fair warning:

is not an easy record to sit through. With the right focus, in the right mindset, this album is as powerful on the soul as climbing a mountain is on the body. This album will crush you if you don’t know what to expect.

Hospice is at once the simplest and most immense album of the year.

Its music is made of small melodies, tiny vocal ranges and repeated, winking guitar lines. It is basic piano, slow-rolling drums.

But the numbers on the lock form the correct code: the combination of those simple sounds works, and through their collective, unified operation comes music that surprises, that soothes and washes over you like a mother bathing her child. It’s music that smacks you on the side of the head, but then embraces you and apologizes in tears for being so cruel.

The Antlers at Cafe Bourbon

Dont just do something stand there — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 14:06:00 +0000

Depending on their subject matter, concept albums have the potential to alienate listeners. Even the term “concept album” sounds a bit pretentious. But the truly great ones transcend story-line, using the thematic material to communicate ideas, questions, truths, emotions—or all of the above—common to the human experience. In other words, you don’t need to be a deaf, dumb and blind pinball champion to appreciate the Who’s Tommy.

The Antlers’ new album, Hospice, uses a fractured relationship between a hospice worker and a young, terminally ill girl (Sylvia) to muse about mortality and all its repercussions—loss, loneliness, anger, empathy, guilt and the like. Singer/songwriter Peter Silberman, whose lyrical and compositional maturity belie his age (23), switches vantage points throughout the album, allowing glimpses into each character’s inner workings.

Complicating matters—in a good way, it turns out—is the patient’s condition. She apparently has cancer, but it’s her mental illness and the resulting nightmares and visions that make the relationship so antagonistic and heartbreaking. In the liner notes, Silberman explains (in character of the hospice worker, it seems) that “something makes her sting, and something makes her want to kill. It made her crawl under that house, and stick her head under the stove.”
Ah yes, but this is supposed to be a live review, right? The Antlers did, in fact, play Cafe Bourbon Street last Thursday as a three-piece, though few were there to see it. (Our Cat Philip, however, did not open the show, to my disappointment. Bourbon Street’s website is notoriously inaccurate. Get on the ball, Bobo!) The mostly empty bar lent the show a vibe that was more flat than intimate, and the band hasn’t completely figured out how to replicate Hospice live yet. The climaxes were even more powerful when heard at arm’s length, but the subtleties weren’t quite as subtle. And I missed the acoustic.

Peter Silberman Reviews

The Antlers - Hospice

The Antlers at Cafe Bourbon