The Antlers placed themselves into the spotlight with their prior album, 2009′s excellent Hospice, and this year their follow up to that acclaimed album dropped called Burst Apart. This album is definitely dark and can be a little hard to grapple with at times, but laying underneath the dark undertones of this album is some incredibly rich production, great song arrangements and some emotional performances. It certainly is an album that is not short on really pulling the emotional strings, but the band has created songs that really manage to evoke some real feeling and substance through their style and arrangement, and the album is one that just has a great sound to it.
The album’s tone is set right away with the lumbering “I Don’t Want Love”, which has atmospheric hooks dropped over a nice rhythm which really seems to be laboring and crawling along almost, and it sets the standard feel for the album which is some familiar, nice melodies that draw you in but the songs have this undercurrent of uneasiness and emotional strife that seems to waft its way in to every song. It is a great juxtaposition of both and the two different styles work beautifully together. “Parentheses” is another great example of this, with a bleak and spacious landscape set by the song, the angular hooks and falsetto vocals of the song just all play off each other to marvelous effect. Songs like “Every Night My Teeth Are Falling Out” start out in this serene way, but then build minor riffs on top of each other to create this bizarre yet great sort of hook to the song.
The back half of the album sets this incredibly theatrical stage between many interludes and two fairly dramatic and emotional songs, “Hounds” and “Putting The Dog To Sleep”. It is dark and guarded, but it really manages to retain this poetic beauty about it the whole way through. “Putting The Dog To Sleep”, the album’s closer, is a great left-turn at the end of the album, eshewing some of the lush arrangements for a more bare bones, down on my knees ballad kind of approach to the song, which is built up and made lush by the end of it, but it exists as a perfect sort of release and close to all of the guarded and subtle emotion of the rest of the album. The directness and immediacy of the last song really breaks the sort of hushed dramatics of much of the album and is a terrific close to this very strong album.
The Antlers have really built up a very strong, dark and emotional album here that really finds ways to express some strong negative or helpless emotions in ways that really stress both listenability and emotional impact, and their ability to really make all of these songs so intriguing and interesting to listen to is a testament to their strength as songwriters and performers. This is a very expansive and dramatic record that is a great listen and definitely is one of the stronger records to come out this year. It certainly hides the ball a little bit on sort of getting into the core of the album, but once you give it enough time it will sink in and the album will really open up to you.
“Parentheses” by The Antlers from Burst Apart
