Antlers

The New-York based Antlers emerged as a major power in post-rock with Hospice (Frenchkiss, 2009), a psychological concept album that displays rare storytelling acumen for rock musicians. Conceptually, Who's rock operas, Gentle Giant's In A Glass House , and, more recently, the Eels' Electro-Shock Blues, Cursive's Domestica and Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea are the obvious references, but the Antlers aim for a more metaphysical and far less glamorous ground. Peter Silberman's unstable, nervous and quivering vocals complement his lyrics, and the even more tormented and elegiac soundscape created by guitarist Darby Cicci (also credited for trumpet, banjo and keyboards), drummer Michael Lerner and bassist Justin Stivers constitutes a third line of narrative. After the instrumental Prologue, a Coldplay-ian litany introduces Kettering that soon accelerates into controlled melodrama. The soundscape is dirty enough to eliminate any suspicion of grandeur. So the waltzing nursery rhyme of Shiva relies on artful jazzy drumming and sloppy keyboards for additional pathos. So the magniloquent Sylvia sounds like Guns N' Roses covering a pop ballad, replete with horn fanfare, but enough eccentric sounds pop up to temper the pomp. The evolution of a song is also studiedly irregular to throw the listener off balance. Bear turns an almost a-cappella declamation into a swinging Sixties melody with loud and thick orchestration.
All of these techniques are leveraged in the longest pieces. The seven-minute Atrophy is a subtle kammerspiel whispered against jazzy drums, a rollicking drum-machine and tender piano notes. When it picks up steam, as usual, it reaches extreme intensity instead of stopping at an affordable midlevel; and so it becomes a piece of abstract electronic music before it restarts as a spare acoustic confession. Silberman switches to a whining falsetto for the soulful rigmarole of Two, reminiscent of pop populists of the past such as Soul Asylum, while Cicci and friends weave a thick atmosphere of mandolin and sitar and all sorts of percussion further aggravate the mix. The eight-minute Wake employs so many aural detours that one almost feels the band is trying to distract the listener from the words. Again, the stream of consciousness explodes in a triumphant finale. There is a general ideology at work of hijacking every detail so that the whole is always more than the sum of its parts and nothing is quite what it seems to be.

Like the 1980s arena rock that inspired it, the sleek electronically enhanced Burst Apart (Frenchkiss, 2011) is largely an exercise in long-distnace seduction. Peter Silberman unleashes his pyche in the touching U2-esque ode I Don't Want Love the falsetto soul ballad over skittish drumming Parentheses, and the tenderly desolate No Widows, whose keyboards toy with Doors-ian grandeur and Pink Floyd-ian angst. His hedonistic side takes over in the rolling synthetic beat of French Exit, that sounds like an update on Inxs, and in the late-night cocktail-lounge funk shuffle Every Night My Teeth Are Falling Out. The hypnotic oneiric looping Rolled Together and the Ennio Morricone-inspired instrumental Tiptoe are the ultimate mood-pieces. The last three songs were probably added just to reach the size of an album: any amateur could have done better.
Multi-instrumentalist Darby Cicci and drummer Michael Lerner work wonders on these mood pieces. They are the ones crafting the soundscape in which Silbermann enjoys getting senselessly lost all the time.

The Antlers's EP Undersea (2012) contains the slow, acid, lazy eight-minute litany "Endless Ladder", the languid Pink Floyd-ian elegy Drift Dive and especially the jazzy, gospel-y ethereal ballad Crest.

The electronic mania was definitely abandoned on Familiars (Anti, 2014), which is, ultimately, nothing but a collection of lounge-jazz ballads propelled (or, better, slowed down) by Darby Cicci's mournful trumpet and Michael Lerner's delicate drumming, something like a cross between the Afghan Whigs and Morphine, but with a lot less drama than either. The falsetto hymn and celestial arrangement of opener Palace are misleading. Doppelganger is a better manifesto for the new stage of the Antlers: slow, slow, slow, gentle, gentle, gentle, bordering on somnambulant, with that trumpet that rarely stops crying. Even the slightly oneiric Pink Floyd-ian keyboard textures of Hotel are anomalous here. The emotional core is better represented by the languid guitar licks and funereal synth lines that lull Director to a pastoral slumber, or by the grand country waltz Revisited, or by the solemn paralysis of Parade or by the closing elegy of Refuge. By comparison, the bluesy instrumental break of Surrender (that buries what would otherwise have been a Cat Stevens-ian lullaby) sounds like punk-rock. Variety is definitely not the group's forte: they take one elementary idea and repeat it over and over again for almost one hour, albeit with elegance and dignity. Romantic pop muzak found its new champions; but, after spending a whole hour listening to this trumpet wailing over ever single melody, you'll be paranoid about trumpets.

Silbermann's first solo album was Impermanence (2017). After a seven-year hiatus, the Antlers released Green to Gold (2021), the first one without Cicci, i.e. the Antlers were reduced to the duo of Silbermann and Lerner.