Record Review: The Antlers - Hospice

For Atlanta Music Guide:

The Antlers
Hospice
Frenchkiss Records

Pete Silberman’s warbling voice exposes a beautiful but deep-rooted anger throughout Hospice, the breakthrough full-length from Brooklyn’s The Antlers. After a wildly successful self-release earlier in the year, the record is getting a proper reissue August 18 via Frenchkiss Records, home of other heavyweights like Les Savy Fav, Passion Pit, The Hold Steady and The Dodos.

It’ll give a wider audience the chance to experience the band’s exploration of the idea of having an abusive loved one in hospice care — of having to be kind at the end of their life, but being beaten down emotionally by them all the same. Silberman speaks of screaming and cursing and apologizing, of fictions, of pushing someone to wake them up, very literally of hospitals (“Epilogue”). His voice cracks with intensity from whispering in a lower register into tortured, strained falsetto at various points; instrumentation ranges from simple four-chord acoustic guitar to huge, piano-driven anthems to electronic ambient swaths that shimmer against each other, all dissonant and pretty...[Read more]