Antlers - Music as a Cure

There is a band, a person, who has interpreted, who has personified the genre of bedroom songwriting, bedroom-pop, often identified with a "homemade" sound and with lyrics that are frequently convoluted, closed in on themselves, somewhere between post-adolescent self-therapy and an exasperated, almost pornographic intimism. Peter Silberman, with his Antlers, didn't simply take a few formal ingredients and elevate the genre into something newer and more mature, in a sort of musical Darwinism; rather, he fully embodied every aspect of this "genre" - united more by a spirit and an expressive style than by a set of references or a genre in the strict sense.

Silberman's music is the epitome of "bedroom music": it shares everything that makes it both loved and hated by listeners - starting with his voice, a frail, androgynous lament, like a stifled scream so as not to disturb the neighbours (a true story). So his tale of love, illness and death, his Hospice, will remain, for better or worse, one of the defining albums of the first decade of the 2000s, alongside "For Emma, Forever Ago", the other work that pushed to the extreme the idea of the artist healing their existential wounds in total isolation, pouring them unfiltered into their music. Of course, this is the great misunderstanding of those years (and not only those), but by the time Peter - like Justin Vernon - tried to explain that art is not life and life is not art, it was already too late.

Silberman's music can rightly be called post-adolescent, because his career began when he was very young, not even twenty, with his first album Uprooted (2006), the first of two records performed entirely by himself, alone. Oddly, though, from the very start he didn't put his own name on the record, but rather the name that would become his band's: Antlers. Although heavily indebted to Peter's hero Elliott Smith ("Nashua", "Stonethrower"), Uprooted is also a promise of great songwriting ability, with acoustic patterns that flirt with folktronica ("First Field") or, more rarely, Americana (the Sheff-esque "I'm Hibernating"), and post-rock progressions that open the heart or fill it, in equal measure, with a heavy, incurable world-weariness ("Keys", the superb quiet-loud of the title track).

Brief inlays of noise foreshadow acoustic flickers ("Flash Floods Don't Retreat"), but the successful, if minimalist, sonic framework is only a confirmation of a strong melodic substance, built on Silberman's thoroughly natural - indeed childlike in the noblest sense of the word - songwriting. Every one of his songs has, in fact, the genuine fluidity of a lullaby, or a nursery rhyme.

It's instead the second album, In The Attic Of The Universe (2007), that allows Silberman to begin developing his idea of music more fully, however imperfect and unripe it may still be. Indeed, it's an album that can be considered, to all intents and purposes, a prototype of the one that followed, both in terms of sound and of the actual development of the record. It's here that Peter develops his ability to build an album in a narrative sense too, not as a mere collection of songs - even if, perhaps, on In The Attic Of The Universe it's precisely the songs that are in short supply compared to the overall structure.

On this record Silberman also makes his vocal style more personal and idiosyncratic, modulating his voice into a sort of vibrato falsetto (distantly reminiscent of Antony's), making his confessions spectral yet strangely penetrating. Everything feels more dramatic, in a sort of epic unfolding within the confines of a bedroom ("On The Roof"). Pinpoint bursts of noise alternate with thundering explosions, and so the bedroom becomes a world, the inner becomes outer, in a kind of manifestation of obsession. Likewise varied are the enigmatic interludes ("Shhh!", the droning intro of "Attic") and the instrumental reprises ("Look!", "The Carrying Arms").

In the end, essentially only one song is left to capture the existential back-and-forth of In The Attic Of The Universe: "The Universe Is Going To Catch You", a true post-Elliott Smith anthem, with a driving chorus arranged over a theme straight out of children's electronica.

"Hospice", or the various ways of losing someone

"['Hospice'] tells the story of a psychologically abusive relationship, part of which takes place in a pediatric oncology ward. The record moves in and out of the hospital, which is true to the relationship itself. Up to a point it's autobiographical, but I guess the best way to describe it is that there are many ways to lose someone. It doesn't always happen through death, even though it closely resembles it."

(Peter Silberman)

After the release of their first two records, almost nobody knows the Antlers. Peter has left the small town of Somers, where he grew up, back in the days of In The Attic Of The Universe, and is now working in Manhattan. It's the ideal moment and the ideal condition - one imagines a mix of the relief of being able to view certain things from geographical distance and newfound independence, and a nostalgia sharpened by guilt - to turn a difficult, youthful past into a record.

Recording of Hospice began in July 2007, a year and a half before its release. In between, the whole compendium of mythology that comes with a hugely successful record. Scenes of inner and outer dissolution, abysses brushed against and sketched out on the score, a vast catalogue of dramatic imagery that has run through the collective imagination of these years, surpassed only by the imagery that turned a cabin in Wisconsin into a shrine on a par with Elvis Presley's grave.

All of this, however evocative and comforting, certainly doesn't do justice to what is finally the fulfilment of a promise Silberman made to himself: to form a band to play his songs. First came a collaboration with another artist marked for greatness, Sharon Van Etten, and then he met the two bandmates who until then had existed only in his imagination: drummer Michael Lerner and multi-instrumentalist Darby Cicci (trumpet, mainly).

The two join Peter while the album is already in full swing (the songs are written during the recording sessions), and the result is a record that keeps the solitary, solipsistic spirit of the Antlers' early work, elevating it into a universal parable with a compact sound of great breadth.

The drones ("Prologue", "Kettering"), the home-made electronics ("Bear", "Shiva"), the hazy acoustic reverb, the falsetto are all still there, but the instrumental passages are no longer just layers of instruments piled on top of each other - they're genuine arrangement textures. The drums are never just a more or less steady beat meant to raise the song's intensity; they actually converse with the songs.

And so takes shape one of the most moving stories of recent years:

I wish that I had known in

After the stormy announcement of "Prologue", these are the words that introduce Hospice, narrated over a recursive pattern of piano chords (repetition will always be a feature of Silberman's songwriting, but it's here that it takes on a precise meaning). Suddenly the voice, almost impersonal in its muffled pain, cuts off communications, and the static electricity seems to suddenly explode into a chilling arc of sparks.

It becomes clear right away, then, that this is a record you don't easily walk away from, and the trajectory of "Sylvia" (a nod to both Sylvia Plath and the novel by Leonard Michaels), an excruciating emotional rollercoaster of contractions and brief moments of muted calm, confirms it, with an ending in which the explosion feels like the final and somehow glorious catharsis of farewell: “Sylvia, I only talk when you are sleeping/ That’s when I tell you everything/ And I imagine that somehow you’re going to hear me”.

On Hospice Silberman manages to describe with extreme clarity, despite his evident personal involvement (which leads him to disarming candor rather than self-pity or invective), the drama embedded even in the most intimate relationships – it's no coincidence he cites Raymond Carver as his primary literary inspiration.

It's the arrangement, almost always, that provides an almost ritual, liturgical release: thus the drones and shattering-glass sounds close the spiral of guilt in "Atrophy".

We thus arrive at the record's signature song, a melody so haunting it haunted even Silberman himself: "For a while, it was the only melody I could write songs to." "Bear" tells the story of an unplanned pregnancy in a young couple, and the abortion that follows, the confusion of their differing reactions, the confusion that lingers about themselves and about life, resolved in the (great) chorus: "We're too old/ We're not old, old at all". It all ends with a suitcase on the floor, and snow on the television screen.

Right after, the searing, purifying noise of "Thirteen", which dissolves into Van Etten's female voice, in a disquieting appeal to the protagonist's guilt: "Pull me out/ Pull me out/ Can't you stop this all from happening?/ Close the doors and keep them out/ Dig me out/ Oh, dig me out/ Couldn't you have kept all this from happening?/ Dig me out from under our house".

But once again it's the major-key progression of "Two" that catches the listener off guard, in one of the most personal tracks on an album that, needless to say, is already deeply personal. A remarkably lucid stream of words, again set over the repetition of the same chord pattern, in which the pain of illness seems to transfigure a complicated relationship, mask regrets, hide tears: “There’s two people living in one small room/ From your two half-families tearing at you/ Two ways to tell the story (no one worries)/ Two silver rings on our fingers in a hurry/ Two people talking inside your brain/ Two people believing that I’m the one to blame/ Two different voices coming out of your mouth/ While I’m too cold to care and too sick to shout”. It's perhaps also the song that would have sounded least like itself had the Antlers remained a one-man band.

After the strange cathartic rise of "Two", the almost detached, meditative description of the death of Hospice's "patient" in "Shiva" comes as no surprise, arranged with metaphysical restraint, so that even the trumpet takes on a ritual sacredness, and the refrain: "Hundreds of thousands of hospital beds/ And all of them empty but mine" becomes the closing line of an emptying liturgy. Likewise, the effects on "Wake" turn the track into a spiritual performed underwater, or perhaps glimpsed through the slats of closed shutters.

The closer, "Epilogue", revisits the melody of "Bear", but leaves the stage to Peter, and the essentially "unarranged" choice for the track also proves to be a winning one, a moved and moving farewell:

When I try to move my arms sometimes, they weigh too much to lift

This is how a totalizing and rather unique experience comes to a close — not only within the musical landscape of recent years, but also marked by a sudden, exponentially growing success, just as happens in every success story of the last few years. Hospice was self-released in March 2009 and immediately sold out — it would later be reissued by Frenchkiss in August. So, within a matter of months, the clubs become Radio City Music Hall, the dates keep multiplying, and the band that follows them on stage is the National.

The new Antlers

No band can stay the same after an album like Hospice. Silberman knows it well: “I think it's the kind of record that for a lot of bands would represent an endpoint. That was never an option for us.” Now that the recording studio is no longer Peter's bedroom in his tiny Manhattan apartment, but a bigger room in Darby's house, the Antlers can afford to think big.

The result is Burst Apart, whose shape was already hinted at in the band's Coldplay-esque live shows: the songs are a kind of synthetic Motown streaked with post-rock (“French Exit”), intersected by the “refined” trip-hop of “Parentheses”, the synthetic dream-pop of “No Widows” and “Hounds”, the crooked theatricality of Grizzly Bear on “Every Night My Teeth Are Falling Out”, right up to the soul ballad “Putting The Dog To Sleep”.

You can clearly sense the band's drive to assert its own identity against the shadow of its masterpiece, but that urgency isn't matched by Silberman's creativity, who here isn't willing to lay down anything truly personal or engaging. Burst Apart is interesting, but dull, because it feels emotionally disconnected: the sound is geared toward a striking live execution but lacks depth. The lyrics themselves amount to little more than a half-hearted attempt at atmosphere.

It would instead be with the following EP, Undersea (2012), that the Antlers would begin to more fully define their new sound. The underwater soul of “Drift Dive” lays out its coordinates: slippery, liquid arrangements, the trumpet as the preferred foil to Silberman's androgynous-diva voice, barely sketched guitar riffs scattering streaks of color. It's an “ambient” turn that helps the band normalize its emotional content — Hospice obviously can't be replicated on that front — without letting the music suffer as a result.

In Undersea, of course, the Antlers no longer deal with existential drama, nor do they aim for a work capable of strongly intervening in people's lives, but they still manage to formulate an underlying concept that finds full expression in the music: “Why not write about how uncertain life is, about what awareness and consciousness are, and about this very moment?”, Silberman says. Even if the band gets carried away on the sprawling “Endless Ladder”, even if the temptation to mix too many genres remains (trip-hop returns on “Crest”), it's on this EP that the Antlers define their new guise.

But it would be on Familiars (2014) that everything would take on the emotional weight the Antlers had been missing. This fifth album by the band is mixed by Chris Coady (Grizzly Bear, TV on the Radio, Beach House), who uses Seventies-era equipment to give the record its gleaming shape, unmistakably reminiscent of the Motown strain. If Hospice represented the potential of what can be expressed through one's own experience alone, musical and otherwise, Familiars is instead the realization of what a band can achieve even without having to tell us something important.

Throughout the album, inspired by a reading of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Silberman adopts a less intimate, vaguely declamatory tone: (“To find the peace within, the calm at where we’re standing/ We have to make our history less commanding”, he sings on “Surrender”), backed by a sound in which synthetic and traditional instruments blend into an indistinguishable flow, a kind of liquid (non)form (as on Undersea), which in unison brings out outward swells, flickers, unheard-of colors. Cicci's trumpet once again becomes, and indeed asserts itself even more as, a fundamental instrument, a sort of lone choir for the record's constant elegiac tone.

The lead single, “Palace”, borrows heavily from the Seventies ballad, including a certain sappiness (“Then when heaven has a line around the corner/ we shouldn’t have to wait around and hope to get in/ if we can carpenter a home in our heart right now/ and carve a palace from within”), which has prompted unflattering comparisons to Chris Martin — comparisons only partly justified.

It's clear that the band is no longer interested in the singer-songwriter aspect of music as such, but rather in building a unique sonic body, in which the voice becomes an instrument and the lyrics are purely decorative (see also the clichés of “Hotel”), not the center of attention. In “Palace” and the rest of the songs on Familiars there's nothing self-indulgent or easy, but rather the fully musical expression of that existential feeling that had been unloaded onto the pages of Hospice.

Silberman's songs thus become purely descriptive, framed in a generic first-person plural that speaks of a hard-won but still vital wisdom, in which relationships finally become the foundation of a stoic resistance to the world's imperfection (“Parade”). The mood on “Revisited”, by contrast, becomes one of post-trauma dead calm.

Amid all this, small guitar constructions like the one on “Intruders” showcase the art of repetition practiced by the Antlers, doing justice to Peter's long-standing passion for Talk Talk. The small miracle of Familiars is that it “hides” the melodies by stretching out the songs and making the sonic palette far more uniform, without making the tracks indistinguishable from one another — instead, it sharpens their narrative quality.

And so it is that Antlers manage the difficult feat of surviving a record so heavy with meaning, after a 5-year purgatory, now positioning themselves as a mature band capable of sustaining itself artistically through its music alone. From here on, anything could happen.

In 2014, a therapeutic exile became necessary for Peter Silberman in the wake of Familiars, when the Antlers frontman completely lost his hearing in one ear and developed severe tinnitus and hypersensitivity in the other. The result of a return to music made of barely-plucked strings and barely-whispered notes in solitude - the only sounds he could tolerate - is all contained in Impermanence, his solo debut.

A story of isolation and therapy in upstate New York that inevitably recalls another celebrated album (about to turn ten years old) which, like this one, ideally follows in the wake of Jeff Buckley (here in "Gone Beyond", or in the deeply inspired dirge "New York"); but it's a story that resonates in a particularly personal way with Peter's artistic sensibility, given that he had already dedicated his harrowing debut as a musician to a hospice. Despite the significance, for a musician especially, of losing one's hearing even temporarily, and despite Silberman's acute sensitivity leading him to reflections bordering on a near-death experience ("I'm disassembling/Piece by piece", he sings in "Karuna"), "Impermanence" tells the story of a healing, and so comes "after" the cathartic acceptance of loss found on Hospice.

Stylistically, this allows him to move between the cold, aestheticizing allure of Familiars and the visceral struggle of Hospice, in the name of a universal prayer, a musical probing of notes in slow convalescence, in search of a collective illumination on the astonishing beauty of the transient ("Karuna"). Musically, Silberman quotes Miles Davis: "It's not the notes you play that matter, but the ones you don't play." Indeed, the balance between the expressed and the unexpressed is one of the most important achievements of Impermanence: on one hand, there's the emotional weight of the arrangement choices, in which even bare electric guitar arpeggios can become bleeding wounds or elusive plays of veils within the space of a single track ("Gone Beyond"), chasing singer-songwriter references but also the art-soul leanings of recent years. Little to nothing comes between Silberman and his instrument, save for refractions, chimes, reverberations, animations of a collective life that the artist feels he's rejoining ("Ahimsa").

But Impermanence is also, and above all, a return to the most elementary basics of songwriting, in which Silberman once again proves his excellence, managing to connect "Maya" to the acoustic closing of Hospice, soon transforming it into another song, suddenly an old-fashioned lullaby. A genuine hidden piece of magic. Throughout the rest of the record, Peter nonetheless shows that one can go beyond the (perhaps) limiting field of melody with very few instruments, very few affectations.

The stylistic refinement of his musical approach, which also carries notable "slow" echoes, makes it entirely credible to trace the spirit of the record back to Eastern philosophy: it's a logical and natural step, one that holds value regardless of how informed it actually is. Definitely not a fashionable embellishment, because "Impermanence" is a heartfelt return to the essence of art: the search for indelible foundations, even within impermanence itself. And thus the reaffirmation of the latter's tremendous and wondrous inevitability.

Pain has often been at the center of Antlers' music, though it has always acted as an agent of expiation, of relief. As a cure. Records like "Hospice", and to a lesser extent some of the others, bear witness to and crystallize a healing process. What we find instead on Green To Gold (2021, self-released) is an entirely different spectacle. From the slow, placid unfolding of "Strawflower" onward, one gets the impression of being submerged in a sea of calm. What reigns over these ten new songs is, if not quite happiness, then serenity.

Chapter six in Antlers' discography (the band now reduced to just Peter Silberman and Michael Lerner) is everything we would hardly have expected from the band. A record to start over with, to enjoy a ray of sunlight straight on your face while watching the sunset from a hill, to welcome spring. One to play as we reclaim the longed-for normality after the pandemic nightmare.

It isn't just a matter of mood - Antlers have also changed in how they write and compose their songs, which today are proper songs in both structure and intent. Everything is less cryptic than in the past, but the lower structural complexity doesn't translate into sloppiness or laxity in the arrangements. These are all meticulously crafted down to the last detail, the last nuance, and like a flower that takes a few days to bloom, they need a few listens to reveal themselves in their layered fullness.

"Green To Gold" is a record as light as air, like dew settling on a blooming meadow. In "Solstice", one of the most beautiful songs the band has ever written, the acoustic guitar seems to accompany the ripples spreading across the surface of a small lake, and Silberman's whisper unravels and spreads into the ether like a gentle echo; the rhythm of "Volunteer" is sparse and brushed, accompanying the off-beat bridge with an almost supernatural lightness; while the title track sees a poetic suburban town turn to gold, between gentle guitar stretches and the elegant chiming of the piano, as autumn arrives.

Amid small electronic effects and the chirping of cicadas, a cheerful, playful piano also takes charge on the crepuscular "Porchlight"; while on "Just One Sec", a delicate, muttering sax intervention adds spice with flair and conviction.

For an even more immersive experience, the record can be listened to alongside the videos (all available on YouTube and linked together into an actual film) directed by Derrick Belcham and Emily Terndrup, which, thanks to the tender everyday-life scenes performed by contemporary dancers Bobbi-Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, confirm the spirit of a work steeped in poetic normality and tenderness.

Four years later, Antlers return with an even more intimate record: Blight (2025) is yet another pained, anguished plea for serenity and beauty, a record marked by notes as sparse as they are erudite. There is grace and discretion in Blight, held within fingerpicked chords that converse with trickles of electronics that never quite turn into rain ("Deactivate"), in melodies that, with different sonic substance, could have aimed for greater grandeur, and instead choose cyclical cadences marked out by a synthesizer and tempered by a few piano notes, before evolving into an incandescent post-rock apotheosis ("Carnage"). Always elegant, rarely abrasive (the title track), Antlers shake the soul with faint, crepuscular melodies (the excellent "Pour").

Silberman's voice is a murmur, a whisper, a concentrate of uncertainty and comfort held within one of the record's most powerful melodies, "Consider The Source"; Blight is a record that ultimately dissolves into darkness over a few piano notes accompanied by the roar of waves and the song of birds ("They Lost All Of Us").

Contributions by Gianfranco Marmoro ("Blight")

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