Review Summary: Heartbreakingly sad, but also undoubtably beautiful.
Two years of isolation and loneliness in a Brooklyn apartment building, The Antlers vocalist Peter Silberman carefully weaved a tragic tale into ten masterfully crafted songs that make up the album
Hospice. It is the story of a man standing over his wife dying of bone cancer in the Sloan Kettering Cancer Ward, reflecting back to their past life together, thinking back to the good and bad decisions they made as a young and reckless couple.
Hospice is an album full of quiet, and lonely words with chilling instrumentals that will send shivers down the listeners spine. It is brutally honest and straightforward about the concept it is trying to convey, making anyone who hears it heartbroken, but still coming back for more.
The first official track is the
Prologue to the story, an instrumental song that gently slides along with a simple one-key piano over a soft roaring background. The song flows ever so smoothly into the next song,
Kettering. “And walking in that room /when you had tubes in your arms/those singing morphine alarms /out of tune,” are lines spoken quietly, almost whispered describing the overall situation of the dying woman in Sloan Kettering. Its midway through when the song picks up slow distorted guitar with in echoing feel giving the sense of loneliness that carries throughout the rest of the album.
Sylvia contains some of the same elements of
Kettering, including the distorted guitar. One major difference, the chorus is loud, yelling the words, “Sylvia, get your head out of the oven/Go back to screaming and cursing, /remind me again how everyone betrayed you.” This track puts a nice flow to the album not keeping it continuously slow and quiet.
The song
Bear, a definite highlight of the album, is one big metaphor about the man thinking back to the unplanned pregnancy he had with the dying woman, and their choice of wither to abort the child or keep it. It is a little faster paced then the rest of the album, and surprisingly the least sad, although dealing with the topic of abortion can be touchy.
Although only standing at ten tracks,
Hospice is almost an hour long, but because the songs lengths vary so much from two and a half minutes, to almost nine minute songs, the time goes by pretty quick. Except for one song only tends to over stay its welcome,
Wake is eight minutes and forty four second song. While it is a good song, it has the same sound almost all eight minutes, and can start making the listener just waiting for the song to be over instead of listening to its excellent lyrics.
Wake is essentially the death of the female cancer patient.
With the door closed, shades drawn, the world shrinks.
Let's open up those blinds. But someone has to sweep the floor,
pick up her dirty clothes. That job's not mine.
Now that everyone's an enemy, my heart sinks.
Let's put away those claws.
I don't blame them for their curtains-calls because I pulled the rope.
I wanna call them back out for applause.
Staying true the opening track,
Hospice ends with a track called
Epilogue, putting Silberman’s final touch to the album. It is an acoustic song that is not as sad as one might expect it to be, it’s just the final words describing a burial, and going on with life without the woman, an excellent and beautiful closer to the album.
Hospice is an album that plays out like a movie in your head, every scene is describe with strong details and not completely vague symbolism so that everything is visualized and the listener feels the pain of the male lead. Although sad, it’s an album meant to be heard, dealing with subjects not always used in music so straightforward. It will leave you heartbroken , but also in love like your living the story itself.
