Graham Reid | | <1 min read
The Antlers: Hotel
Peter Silberman, the mainman behind and up-front of New York's Antlers, has been making steady and stealthy moves towards greater acclaim with a series of lovely and sometimes pained albums which have increasingly become more musically complex.
They've also managed to retain a sense of the hurting heart within the orchestration.
Their 2010 album Hospice was a 10-song cycle about caring for an abusive person who was dying, which was hardly an easy-entry into their work, but their Burst Apart the following year put them around the musical and emotional midpoint between Arcade Fire and Sigur Ros.
This time out their strange elegance – evoked by a distant trumpet, shuffle of synths, cello and horns – seems perfectly pitched for lyrics about dislocation and discomfort, the passing of youth and early adulthood, and a desire to find certainty: “When I'm older I'll be clearer . . . I wrote a list of my demands and then I burned an older version”.
So there's heartfelt indie-angst, sophisticated arrangements, meaningful lyrics and Silberman's yearning and sometimes intimate vocals.
Seductive, rewarding, unpredictable, intense yet oddly comforting.
And really quite something.
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