The Antlers - Hospice (2009) [Lossless/FLAC]

Thanks to mrkiko!

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Email me if you are looking for an album in Lossless/FLAC (even obscure ones). I'd be willing to send you a link to it if you would share the album on publicbt/thepiratebay after you finish downloading it. My email: centroids1@gmail.com
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Lossless/FLAC
Includes: Log/Cue

REVIEW FROM INDIE SHUFFLE:
http://www.indieshuffle.com/?p=801

Sounds Like: bon iver, cursive, dm stith

what's so good?
Why do we like sad music? It’s a bit masochistic to enjoy feeling miserable. Maybe we’re just drawn to music that can relate to our darkest moments. After all, songs like the Beatles’ “She Loves You Yeah” can’t describe every day of your life. It can actually make you feel worse in the wrong context. Some times you need a good break-up album to snuggle up with, knowing someone felt as crappy as you did at one point.

But the Antlers’ Hospice is not your typical “Wah, my girlfriend dumped me” album. It actually speaks of a pain very few people can relate to. There’s a very loose story throughout based on the idea of caring for an abusive terminally ill loved one, investing total emotional strength and doing everything possible to no avail. It’s a unique sense of hopelessness spoken through singer Peter Silberman’s tragically beautiful lyrics backed by soft and swelling instrumentation and straining ambient textures that almost perfectly capture the desperate pain behind the words. From the haunting grind of the opening “Prologue” to the final notes of Silberman’s falsetto in “Epilogue,” this whole album left me absolutely floored. It’s not music to wallow in your sorrow to; it draws you into its own world with its own pain. And in the end, it’s all about overcoming rather than sulking.

The Antlers self-released Hospice earlier this year, but it was picked up by French Kiss records within months after receiving praise from the music world and selling out nearly every copy available. Despite its humble beginnings, Hospice easily ranks among the best albums of the year. I picked out the track “Bear” because it’s one of the best individual songs, but you should really listen to this album front to back to fully appreciate its beauty.



Sometimes you have to put yourself first, no matter how difficult that notion seems; no matter how much time and effort you’ve already put into this one person—the person who’s reduced your very being to its absolute core. Just ask Peter Silberman, the string-pulling founder of The Antlers, a solo project that suddenly went widescreen on the self-released Hospice LP (now receiving a proper widespread pressing through Frenchkiss). The first Antlers effort to feature two key permanent players—powerhouse drummer Michael Lerner and the layer-lathering multi-instrumentalist Darby Cicci—it’s an album with a sound that’s actually as ambitious as its concept.

“Hospice came from the idea of caring for a terminal patient who’s mentally abusive to you,” says Silberman. “You don’t have the right to argue with them, either, because they’re the one who’s dying here; they’re the one that’s been dealt a wrong hand. So you take it, but you can only take so much. Eventually, you realize that this person is just destroying you.” Appropriately enough, Hospice’s 10 distinct chapters resonate on debilitating sonic and lyrical levels, from the hypnotic harp and tension-ratcheting build of “Two” to the sing-or-sink choruses of “Bear” and the speaker-rattling peaks of “Sylvia,” easily one of the year’s most immediate epics.

It’s here, amidst contrasting shards of ambient noise, sweeping strings and smoky horns, where The Antlers truly transcend Silberman’s singer-songwriter beginnings—a striking escalation of expectations first hinted at on 2008’s New York Hospitals EP. The progression doesn’t end there, either. In a move that could be taken as the riff-raking extension of his thorough guitar training (from the age of 6 ‘til right before college), “Atrophy” and “Wake” delve into sheets of distortion, subtle shades of soul, cicada-like effects and enough movements to fill an entire EP. “We were going for something that’d be dense but not too complicated,” explains Silberman. “I hate the word ‘lush,’ but I guess that’s the best way of describing it.

The structures are like pop songs—verse/chorus, verse/chorus—but the sound is a little more shoegaze-y or post-rocky.” It’s about to get even more complicated, too, as The Antlers’ Technicolor-tinged trio take all of Hospice’s songs—and three previous releases—in a completely different direction, jettisoning a note-for-note rendition of the record for “a massive sound” doused in delay, reverb and unrehearsed chaos. And to think Cicci was a stage actor with a desire to drop it all for music just a few years ago. “Hospice was the clear indication that this isn’t a singer-songwriter thing at all,” says Silberman. “Whatever we record next is going to define the three of us as a ‘band.’ He continues, “I always figured I’d be the ‘shredder’ in a group…But things somehow ended up this way.” We wouldn’t have it any other way, either.

TRACK LIST:

01. Prologue - 2:35
02. Kettering - 5:10
03. Sylvia - 5:27
04. Atrophy - 7:40
05. Bear - 3:54
06. Thirteen - 3:11
07. Two - 5:56
08. Shiva - 3:45
09. Wake - 8:44
10. Epilogue - 5:25


http://frenchkissrecords.com/bands/profile/the_antlers/