ANTLERS - Blight

"Blight" is yet another pained, anguished plea for serenity and beauty, an album marked out by notes as spare as they are erudite. It's the latest act of resistance from a musician who has had to face serious personal hardships (damage to his vocal cords and hearing loss), while at the same time wondering how hard we're really fighting to stave off an increasingly likely natural catastrophe.

There's grace and restraint in "Blight", held within fingerpicking chords that converse with trickles of electronics that never quite turn into rain ("Deactivate"), in melodies that, with different sonic substance, could aspire to greater glory, and instead opt for cyclical cadences marked out by a synthesizer and tempered by a handful of piano notes, over which to muse on humanity's cruelty toward nature, before evolving into a blazing post-rock apotheosis ("Carnage").

It's hard to separate the purely musical element from the lyrical context and the content, always rich with deep reflection but also contradictions and naivety, which Silberman confronts with awareness and a tone that's never harsh.

Always elegant, rarely abrasive (the title track), Antlers stir the soul with faint, crepuscular melodies, sung over a handful of crystalline acoustic guitar chords and an instrumental crescendo that harks back to their glorious post-rock past (the excellent "Pour").

Silberman's voice is a whisper, a murmur, a concentrate of uncertainty and comfort packed into one of the album's most powerful tracks: "Consider The Source", a melody as spare as it is heartfelt and enveloping, oozing emotion, carried by a trembling voice and piano - the same piano that, with equally gentle notes, brings down the curtain on "Blight", accompanied by crashing waves and birdsong ("They Lost All Of Us"), until it dissolves into darkness.