I was probably a little rough on the Antlers’ 2007 EP In the Attic of the Universe. Early raves suggested that Peter Silberman had used isolation to wring out his heart and deliver a moving, uncompromising record (copy and paste and relocate to Wisconsin for the more deserved applause of Justin Vernon's Bon Iver debut). But the results in my mind were wrinkled and elusive, only three real songs in the seven tracks, produced in unnecessarily long and aimless “sweeps”—the extra bits felt flabby and pretentious, the meat more often underwhelming than stirring. Aside from “The Universe Is Going to Catch You,” there was virtually no substance, and the anticipated brilliance turned out to be an elaborate sleight-of-hand (or the grimmest, most straight-faced parody imaginable). But before you lash out at my negative opinion, let me say that I wish that I hadn’t deleted it from my hard drive two years ago (after downloading it for free from the band’s website); based on the lovely, heartbreaking returns of Hospice, I’m beginning to wonder how right or wrong I was.
It seems equally easy to scoff at or gush over Hospice. The hard-bitten will keep it at arm’s length and snidely dismiss it as trite treacle, a tearjerker-of-the-week from the Hallmark Company so artificial in genuine action and response that it feels plotted by a hungry robot that subsists only on salty human tears. The easily-broken romantics will need two boxes of tissues and a resuscitation from a paramedic as their heart dangerously palpitates and they become dehydrated from too many hours spent crying. This is an album about a woman dying of bone cancer and the home-care worker who falls in love with her, marries her, and then watches her slowly die. It is a detail painfully close to my own heart at the moment as my grandfather suffers terribly from the same affliction. Yet it is not in the personal reflection that found me falling off my guard, but rather the great strides in both lyricism and songcraft taken by Silberman that is worthy of the praise.
The unnecessary tangents of Universe are replaced here by beneficial intrusions of quiet stillness and dense, searing noise. There’s gradient to be found, but mostly Hospice is dominated by lonesome, melancholy ambience and busy, blustery releases. Even with the occasional relief of faint humor and humanity, the songs are too downtrodden to be declared anthemic, but there are hidden hooks and catchy melodies to find—the Arcade Fire-esque “Sylvia” and the spry guitar bounce of “Bear” chief among them. While the tone and tremor still suggests a “bedroom recording,” the empty found-sound posturing of Universe has fallen away, replaced by spare studio collages, modulated and varied instrumental performances, and a full band presence. Silberman recently expanded the Antlers from a solo act/alias to a trio (adding Michael Lerner and Darby Cicci); nevertheless, it still sounds like a whole team of engineers and multi-instrumentalists were hard at work on this album. Even the smallest, most composed passages bubble and bristle subtly with tender ache. Intimacy still rules most of the way, but it feels like a shared experience for an entire community of mourners and storytellers.
After an instrumental prologue (appropriately called “Prologue”), “Kettering” introduces us to the two characters: the narrator with “an unpayable debt” and the patient who’s been “abused by the bone that refused” her. The relationship is uncomfortable at first—“When I was checking vitals/I suggested a smile/You didn’t talk for a while/You were freezing/You said you hated my tone/It made you feels so alone/So you told me I had to be leaving.” But something compels him to stay, and eventually the abuse he suffers is far kinder to his nerves than the self-defeat of the terminal woman. On “Sylvia,” over big, crashing guitars that shoots Silberman into the stratosphere, he shouts, “Sylvia, get your head out of the oven/Go back to screaming and cursing/Remind me again how everyone betrayed you.” The only intimacy is shared when Sylvia’s suffering is temporarily staved off by sleep; it’s the only time he talks to her: “That’s when I tell you everything/And I imagine that somehow you’re going to hear me.”
The appropriately named “Atrophy” witnesses the association blooming full. Desperate and helpless, during the coda he moans, “Someone, oh, anyone, tell me how to stop this/She’s screaming, expiring, and I’m her only witness/I’m freezing, infected and rigid in that room inside her/No one’s gonna come as long as I lay still in bed beside her.” And on “Two,” the narrator gets the ice water thrown in his face—“In the middle of the night I was sleeping sitting up/When a doctor came to tell me, ‘Enough is enough’.” Silberman’s voice almost cracks on the next song (“Shiva”) as he describes, “Suddenly every machine stopped at once/And the monitors beeped the last time/Hundreds of thousands of hospital beds/And all of them empty but mine.” The shared burden amplified on “Two” aggravates the broken narrator’s suffering. Over a choir of ethereal keys and a forlorn acoustic strum, he murmurs, “My face became yours/My femur was breaking in half/The sensation was scissors and too much to scream/So instead I just started to laugh.”
If “Shiva” devastates, then “Wake” provides the catharsis. But the catharsis is still haunted; the narrator will never get over the loss, and he learns that dealing with it is the only way forward. The reminder still lingers of how he opened himself to the terminal patient and widened the breach for this flood of sinking sadness—“It was easier to lock the doors and kill the phones than to show my skin/Because the hardest thing is never to repent for someone else/It’s letting people in”—but ultimately his message is that the burden is not too great to summon the generosity of an emotional and physical connection with anyone. Nevertheless, her spirit returns to him night after night during the epilogue (again, appropriately named “Epilogue”) and we realize that loss can never be shaken away.
Detaching myself from the complex but unbearably heartrending emotional drama unfolded by Silberman proved impossible considering the details of the disease, but its themes are just universal enough to alleviate that discomfort all the while it added new grave hurt to my psyche. The relentless helplessness isn’t quite numbing but even the rare rays of light are followed by even darker clouds to knock you back down with an extra bruise. It’s not without its minor flaws: The abortion reality/metaphor of “Bear” isn’t integrated as well as it could have been—on its own, it’s a terrific track, but the story becomes a little muddled at this point. And while individually, they all work well, the emotional abyss it carves into your heart could have used a little more invigoration to counter the deterioration. Would that have upset the elegiac sadness of the album? Perhaps, but if it was handled with the same deft touch that Silberman frequently displays across Hospice, it could have solidified and intensified an already near-perfect album. As such, it is difficult, depressing, uncompromising and cripplingly heartfelt—a great record if you’re in the mood to cry all afternoon.
"Hospice" is on sale August 18, 2009 from Frenchkiss.
