Hospice

So, admittedly I’m a latecomer to this record, but it’s so damn good I’m gonna write about it anyways. The cover art and the album title give the listener fair warning of the emotional landscape they’re about to enter. The album’s lyrics, subject matter, and backstory are absolutely devastating, but, then, we’ve heard all that before. What separates this album is its commitment to conveying its complex emotions sonically as well as lyrically.

The seminal Antler, Peter Silberman, reportedly withdrew from his Brooklyn surroundings for over a year, suffering through an experience one can only assume is, at the very least, tangentially related to the story within Hospice. He distilled that anguish into the apartment recordings that would become this record. On the album Silberman tells the story of a man falling in love with a terminally ill patient and the subsequent pitfalls of a romance with a predetermined half-life. This isn’t Hollywood and you already know how the story will end.

Unlike a typical narrative-based album that adheres to a fairly uniform sound (often lo-fi, chamber pop, etc) serving as a backdrop, while relying on prominently featured vocals to tell the story, Hospice swings wildly between skeletal lo-fi folk, ambient compositions, and lush anthemic pop that at times completely obscure the vocals. That is no accident, as Silberman is telling a heartbreaking story of love, illness, loss and grief set mostly amidst the florescent lights and whirring machinery of hospital rooms and hallways. As in real life, when pain and love and joy become too intense to process in real time, words become inadequate to fully articulate the experience. To compensate (or more accurately, complement), Silberman, uses huge sonic shifts to bridge that gap and put the listener in those thin spots between this world and the one we cannot describe. You know, those places that lodge whimpers, yelps, and foreign words firmly in your throat and won‘t let your eyes close. That’s not to say that the lyrics and vocals alike are not gorgeous. Beautifully and intimately recorded in a Brooklyn apartment, Silberman’s falsetto flutters and breaks in all the right places and the sincerity of his approach gilds even questionable lines like “we’re fucked, and not getting un-fucked soon” in pure gold. It also doesn't hurt that up-and-coming female folky Sharon Van Etten lends her lilting, haunted vocals to the voice of the dying lover. This album might ultimately wreck you, but on the way you’ll find all the places high and low and in between.