The Antlers

It is cold where she lies and when she wakes, white walls meet her eyes. Blank canvas for her unfocused eyes and you are hunched over with grief as you wait for the recognition to light up in her face. But such dark circles underlay her weary face and she gropes for your hand, the only warm thing in the room. While she sleeps, attached to wires and tubes, your own heartbeat rises and falls with the beep of the machine monitor. It is the only sound of life in this sterile room. Until you speak. To her.

This is Hospice by the Antlers. And that introduction was needed to prepare you for 53 minutes of highs and lows with main Antler-man Peter Silberman. This album is an emotional tour d'force. It is a journey. It is a march through a Russian winter. It is helplessness, stark fear, and loss. And so, so much more.

Sidelined as a witness to a love one's descent from cancer, Hospice begins with a sweeping Prologue and ends with a fluttering falsetto Epilogue, in between we sit fixated in bated breath. Silberman's smooth, patient voice treks through strained moments of dismay and simple melancholy. Without his voice, this album could have been a sad contender as Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion's little sister. With it, we play spectator to a hospital bed-bound victim. Each straining note, gripped hands are squeezed tighter. And we wait for Silberman to break beneath despair. Yet he never wavers.

On "Kettering," the words are slipping so softly that the words drip from his lips along a piano march. "There was no saving you" he ends as a fuzzy guitar reverb and drums segue us to "Sylvia," aptly named after Sylvia Plath. "Bear" is the most tragic (and easily best) track on this harrowing tale as it opens with a simple piano arrangement that could be for a child's mobile. But equating a bear cub with an unwanted pregnancy is where the beautiful turns into the forlorn as the chorus sweeps us into the realization that "we're too old/we're not old at all." How does one measure a life? Old enough to live, young enough to die.

I stick to my quick blurb on "Bear" as a summary of this album. With each track, we see Silberman's vulnerability slowly exposed and it is terrifying. And it is paralyzing to hope for a better end but when the penultimate track is titled "Wake," there is futile knowledge that the end is cold. So we listen, with knees pulled up to our chest and clasped hands to our lips. And we tremble along.