The Antlers’ Hospice is a beautiful, morbid meditation on loss, guilt, and responsibility. Antlers frontman Peter Silberman’s rich falsetto evokes Jeff Buckley at his most beautiful, yet never slides into ostentatious as Buckley’s could. The pacing of the album and frequent revisting of melodic motifs brings to mind Neutral Milk Hotel’s peerless In an Aeroplane Over the Sea in mood and texture.
As the title suggests Hospice seems to take place at the bed side of a dying lover, or perhaps dying love. The songs conjure a scene of reluctant waiting for the inevitable, a mixture of anger, empathy, and sadness. So why am I listening to this over and over again? The angelic hooks and dynamic range of this album make it hard to step away. Think Sigur Rós, but with the emotional depth that the Icelandic quartet’s use of a made up language of coos and screams often circumvents.
“Epilogue” is a special standout in this collection. Returning to the melody theme established in the earlier “Bear” and the bonus track “Sylvia, an Introduction” , the album comes whispering to a close. The subject of the song seems to have willfully given up a fight that the narrator was not ready to yield. Here it seems to come into focus that the cancer-taken lover may in fact be a way of reconciling the loss of a relationship, the protagonist wants to follow the love to the morgue to sleep with it, insisting that it may be being buried alive. There is something disturbing about the notion of needing to to rationalize a breakup as a terminal cancer but at this point you can’t look away.