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This quintet of musicians are making a name for themselves and with Hospice, they have remarkably made one of 2009’s best albums.
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Hospice sits squarely in this camp, a heartbreaking aural experience that hits us on a deeper level.
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Hospice isn’t uplifting or hopeful; it explores themes of dejection through delicate, beautiful sounds.
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Hospice answers silliness with solemnity, jitters with nerve. Their band name simply describes their music: a delicately branching instrument of force.
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Hospice mixes the personal and fictional in a way that few indie albums outside releases from Arcade Fire and Neutral Milk Hotel tend to do. Granted, Antlers aren’t in that league yet, but Hospice positions them as one of the more exciting young bands in indie rock today.
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Hospice is packed with lofty choruses and extended instrumental passages (the alternately elegiac and tedious 'Atrophy'). But with emotional drama in abundance (mostly from vocalist Peter Silberman’s fiery, tormented shouts), sonic indulgences like the astral guitar blasts on “Thirteen” offer genuine catharsis.
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It’s obvious Hospice is an album Silberman made for himself, one that we’re just privileged to listen to and enjoy. So sit back, listen, and consider yourself lucky, punk.
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Hospice is a work of rare beauty and a watershed moment in The Antlers’ career.
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There’s a straightforward appeal to the album’s dynamism and fatalism, but that appeal swells with each close listen.
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Alternative PressIt's a tidy package that's well-planned and executed, but with a few pop songs so well written, it's easy to want the band to shift directions and let the post-rock go by the wayside. [Sep 2009, p.100]
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Hospice is a fully-realized and fully-functional concept album.
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As a breakup narrative, it’s successful. As pop music, it’s either too insular or simply unable to turn Silberman’s own experience into something one would desire to revisit.
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FilterHospice accomplishes volumes by the addition of drumer Michael Lerner and multi-instrumentlist Darby Cicci, creating an expansively profound album addressing life's most transitory and fragile states. [Summer 2009, p.94]
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Silberman's compulsion to write these songs may have been cathartic for him, but listening to them is most certainly cathartic for all of us.
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Hospice is an album of white walls, long desolate passages, and sudden blitzkriegs of high emotional drama – it’s not always comforting, but the players are hyper-attentive to the nuances of each note and lyric.
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Somehow, the lighter Hospice gets, the heavier it hits.
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Hospice succeeds by conveying deeply personal traumas as universally appreciable truths, until one man's lonely, painful catharsis transmogrifies into something panoramic and shared by all.
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Brooklyn's latest greatest deliver heartbreaking concept album.
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MojoThis soaring album defines emotional shoegazing. [Dec 2009, p. 101]
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UncutBest is "Sylvia", where Bon Iver's intimacy, Arcade Fire's ambition, Sigur Ros' other-worldly reach and Flaming Lips' psych experimentalism collide. [Dec 2009, p. 98]
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Q MagazineA musical vigil primed to cut a path from bedside to festival stage. [Dec 2009, p. 111]
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 143 out of 157
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Mixed: 1 out of 157
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Negative: 13 out of 157
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Dec 31, 2014
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May 22, 2011
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Jun 18, 2017