THE ANTLERS: BURST APART
[rating: 4.5]
The Antlers: Burst Apart
Label: Fake Four Inc.
Release date: April 26, 2011
One of the biggest mistakes a band can make is trying to replicate a truly monumental album. For The Antlers, Hospice represents their mecca: a singular narrative made up of equal parts beauty and emotional wreckage encapsulated flawlessly in its own unique moment in time. And so with the band’s fourth full-length, there is no chasing of elusive ghosts. Instead, Peter Silberman and company have crafted an entirely different memento of near-equal magnitude. They’ve called it Burst Apart.
Instead of chronicling one tale from different perspectives as they did on Hospice, Burst Apart is broken down into 10 smaller stories, some of which do borrow from common themes (references to dogs and teeth are prevalent). The songwriting certainly feels less ambitious than when we last heard from The Antlers, but that comes as a refreshing alteration rather than a frustrating one. Hospice was so affective that not only does the band need to step back from it, but listeners do as well. And to keep things in perspective, the writing on Hospice set the bar astronomically high. Still, the stories of Burst Apart stand as a testament to Silberman’s proficiency. “No Widows”, one of the many great sonic revelations on the album, sounds written from the perspective of a soldier isolated from family and friends overseas. “If I never get back home/there’s no garden overgrown/no widows in the walls/no widows left alone”, Silberman sings, as if the protagonist is trying to convince himself that not making it out of his situation and back home might not be so bad after all. As the song progresses, Silberman grabs the harmony by the shoulders and lifts it up, sending it soaring over the track. Indicative of literally every song here, there’s an otherworldly power to each note, vocal run, and arrangement.
With the stories pushed a bit to the background, the band have really put an impetus on expanding their sound. The biggest influence here, especially on the first two singles “Parentheses” and “Every Night My Teeth Are Falling Out”, is Radiohead, which isn’t a likeness that gets accurately thrown around often. These songs don’t just sound bigger, but they actually take on a dynamic, alien quality unlike anything the trio has done before. But even though they’ve magnified their sound — thicker layers, heavier percussion — their ability to make a stripped down song into something mountainous hasn’t withered, especially on the last four tracks. On “Corsica”, Silberman’s voice and the gentle, romanticized guitar strums that run up beside it take on a gorgeous echo as if the song were recorded from inside an enormous empty coliseum. Self-produced by Silberman and bandmates Michael Lerner and Darby Cicci, this song replicates some of the things that made the narratives of Hospice work so well: even though the instrumentation is held at a minimum, it sounds completely cavernous and expansive.
On the band’s profile over at the Frenchkiss Records website, there’s a bunch of quotes about how the new album came together and what the benchmarks were. Towards the end, Cicci is quoted as saying something that not only frames the record wonderfully, but attaches the perfect wording to it. “We want to draw people into the world of the record,” he says. And when you listen to it, that statement really crystallizes. Its sound and content might be different, but that’s because Burst Apart is an entity all unto its own: a captivating world brimming with a ravishing, hypnotic magnetism.
