Imagine that your long-term lover has just broken up with you - that it was messy and painful (and probably via Facebook) and that you’re ‘Help me I’m drowning in a sea of Petrarchan love sonnets’ heartbroken. Now imagine that, the poetry failing to quell that aching in your chest, you decide to drown your sorrows in that old companion of yours - the friendly bottle of Baileys. Of course, kids, drowning sorrows in alcohol never works and, having lost all control of that lovesickness due to the wanton consumption of the now not-so-appealing liquor (as well as heading towards the well-explored realms of alcohol-induced sickness) you decide to watch a film to cheer you up. You choose Bambi. Of course, Disney will cheer me up, you say to yourself, this will make me feel much better - this is a children’s film, it’s meant to be blissful and euphoric. You sing along to ‘Drip drip drop little April showers’, slurring the lyrics and straining pitifully to reach the high notes, and then disaster strikes. The winter. Bambi’s mother is shot by a hunter. You’re distraught. You can’t understand why anyone would do that. You’re almost in tears when that gammy VCR you were using conks out and the film stops. It pushes you into fully-fledged weeping. You’ll never know what happens to Bambi without his mother - he’s alone just like you. You cry yourself into a sleep in which you are assailed by grim hunters with loud, angry guns…
Ok, so maybe I got carried away with the overly long, ridiculously contrived metaphor, but that was the only way I could get you to understand the sheer power of Hospice. Yes, I realise I’m supposed to be reviewing Burst Apart, but the previous release is of great significance when we’re assessing The Antlers’ fourth album. The coma-inducing heartbreak that defined Hospice stemmed from the story that Silberman wove so delicately into the lyrics - and this is where the problem of progression lay for The Antlers . Hospice was a concept-album so perfectly moulded by its writer that once the story was exhausted, he was always going to struggle in ever matching its searing brilliance. But clearly The Antlers aren’t a band that shy away from a challenge - they opened the song writing responsibilities up to the entire band and didn’t even try to make an album that could be compared to the debut. Burst Apart is a new album. It’s not the follow up to Hospice. It’s not a continuation of Hospice. It is Burst Apart - en entirely separate entity, where we see The Antlers growing into a new band free from the defining brush strokes that Hospice swept across their image.
Before you start to panic, though, we are still graced with the operatic beauty of Silberman’s falsetto - the defining sound of The Antlers. It soars in opener I Don’t Want Love, both delicate and cutting as he croons ‘You wanna climb up the stairs, I wanna push you back down’. However, in terms of sound, they have progressed quite considerably. There is less of the apathetic urgency that we heard in Hospice and the instrumentation is more ambient - a variety of echo-laden synths swelling in the tracks. The album, in this sense, feels far less burdened with the need to tell a story - the whole band knows that there is no need for the songs to follow on or to fit, and so they seem far more relaxed in their composition. There is no Sylvia in this record, crashing through the album in a deluge of unclean energy - neither the vocals nor the instrumentation ever seem stretched. Yet, even though this album doesn’t have some of that raw energy, it is less of a ‘depressing’ (for want of a better word) album.
This may well be due to the lyrical content of Burst Apart. The lyrics are more abstract, and though each song tells its own story they are not defined by that story. These lyrics don’t force the listener into understanding any pattern behind the album - you can comfortably project your own ideas onto the songs of Burst Apart. Something that was restricted significantly by the debut’s back-story. However the lyrics aren’t as good as Hospice’s. It’s understandable really, as it’s generally easier to develop lyrics around a series of events and ideas that make up a sequence. While the lyrics of Burst Apart are by no means poor, they lack the devoted attention to detail that made Hospice one of the greatest albums, lyrically, that I’ve ever heard. I suppose, though, you can’t blame them. After being trapped with the narrative lyricism of Hospice it must have been a joy for the band to try out some more experimental, simpler and more figurative angles.
Album opener I Don’t Want Love is based around a plain concept, yet retains some quite earnestly evocative lyrics and is propelled by the simple instrumentation and the contrast between falsetto-fettered verses and lower choruses. Hounds builds slowly into a cascading waterfall of echoing sounds, washing over your body as you listen, and Putting The Dog To Sleep’s conceit is a metaphor as shallow as the Abercrombie and Fitch employment team, yet it still retains emotional credibility thanks to the perfect punctuation of the drumming, and Silberman’s once again magnificent vocals. Burst Apart is the kind of album that you put on your mp3 player when you’re out on a midnight walk and you need something to keep you company. It is warming in its melodies, and soothing in its vocals. Though the lyrics might not be as substantial and the emotion not so bared, it is another brilliant album. They didn’t try and make another Hospice - instead The Antlers produced the lilting, lonesome, nightcap-lullabies of Burst Apart.
