The Antlers - Hospice
Critic Score
Based on 27 reviews
2009 Ratings: #24 / 923
Year End Rank: #14
User Score
2009 Rank: #60
Liked by 199 people
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CRITIC REVIEWS

100
Sputnikmusic

If you feel like you can't feel anything, it is, by far, the best piece of music I have discovered for bringing back your sense of emotion and connection with reality.

91
A.V. Club
There’s a straightforward appeal to the album’s dynamism and fatalism, but that appeal swells with each close listen.
90
musicOMH

In a similar fashion to Bon Iver‘s For Emma, Forever Ago, Hospice succeeds by conveying deeply personal traumas as universally appreciable truths, until one man’s lonely, painful catharsis transmogrifies into something panoramic and shared by all.

90
Spectrum Culture
It’s a staggering, nuanced and near-perfect record whose triumphs and tragedies are never trivial or melodramatic; an album of mourning that nevertheless allows flickers of promise to shine through.
90
Consequence of Sound

With a combination of atmosphere and lyricism, The Antlers’ Hospice is one of the best albums of the year so far.

90
Pretty Much Amazing
This is not something you want to listen to at a party, or on the radio. But it is an album that begs to be understood, excruciating though that understanding may be. Amazingly enough, Silberman’s exile, isolation, and loneliness have given birth to a testament to human connection.
88
Beats Per Minute

The Antlers are as commanding as musicians as they are poets. Hospice brings Silberman’s descent into the inferno an unerring dramatic instinct and an ability to transfix the listener by a profound, imaginative manipulation of the tragic and the blackly funny aspects of the experience.

85
Pitchfork
Brooklyn band offers a skyscraping blend of the ambient and the anthemic, a record that swings for the bleachers at a time when it's fashionable to bunt.
80
The Irish Times
As Silberman has found out, his delicate songs don't lose a jot of impact when there are more players behind the ball.
80
Q Magazine
A musical vigil primed to cut a path from bedside to festival stage.
80
Prefix

Hospice mixes the personal and fictional in a way that few indie albums outside releases from Arcade Fire and Neutral Milk Hotel tend to do. Granted, Antlers aren’t in that league yet, but Hospice positions them as one of the more exciting young bands in indie rock today.

80
God Is in the TV

The album works fantastically, it had me hooked by the heartstrings in the same way Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago did last year. Hospice is gentle on the ear, but heavy on the mind, balanced perfectly to create wonderful wintery listening.

80
NOW Magazine

Hospice isn’t uplifting or hopeful it explores themes of dejection through delicate, beautiful sounds.

80
Uncut
Best is "Sylvia", where Bon Iver's intimacy, Arcade Fire's ambition, Sigur Ros' other-worldly reach and Flaming Lips' psych experimentalism collide.
80
The Guardian

Somehow, the lighter Hospice gets, the heavier it hits.

80
Under the Radar
Silberman's compulsion to write these songs may have been cathartic for him, but listening to them is most certainly cathartic for all of us.
80
AllMusic

It's a woe-heavy record that could easily be crushed by its own weight, except for the fact that it's delivered with such ease.

80
PopMatters

Hospice is a fully-realized and fully-functional concept album.

80
Tiny Mix Tapes

Hospice is a work of rare beauty and a watershed moment in The Antlers’ career. 

80
Drowned in Sound

Hospice is an album of white walls, long desolate passages, and sudden blitzkriegs of high emotional drama – it’s not always comforting, but the players are hyper-attentive to the nuances of each note and lyric.

70
Alternative Press
It's a tidy package that's well-planned and executed, but with a few pop songs so well written, it's easy to want the band to shift directions and let the post-rock go by the wayside.
70
SPIN

Hospice is packed with lofty choruses and extended instrumental passages. But with emotional drama in abundance, sonic indulgences like the astral guitar blasts on “Thirteen” offer genuine catharsis.

68
Coke Machine Glow
As a breakup narrative, it’s successful. As pop music, it’s either too insular or simply unable to turn Silberman’s own experience into something one would desire to revisit.
60
Clash

An ebbing and flowing symphony of tender vocals and shoegazing guitar washes, expressing the narrative tension with admirable empathy, punctuated by blasts of reverb drenched choruses. 

60
Mojo
This soaring album defines emotional shoegazing.
nemgax
78

my therapist says I’m not allowed to listen to this anymore

knewnie
70

ahh, Hospice. a certified /mu/ classic, if that means anything. it's a damn shame the whole internet music community and culture was created and spearheaded by one of the most violently bigoted and reprehensible hellholes on the face of the earth, isnt it? im glad as a whole people are beginning to move on from that community, they're having less influence on what people are enjoying and listening too. they still certainly have a large presence, that's undeniable, but it's in a far diminished ... read more

Indicate
70

Bro how are people calling this bad in any way, the emotion used on every build up is actually beautiful and I’m not usually the one to be impacted by emotion but on a album like this it’s almost impossible to look past that factor. It truly is a special piece of music that comforts you in any situation you might be in while dealing with life.

BenTheDragon
NR

Abusive relationships are bad.

MrPancake
50

Listening to a new album every day: Day 243

I'm really mixed on this. It feels like something I should like a lot. It's an indie rock concept album with sad lyrics and moments of intensity, that's like my favorite thing. But the way this album is executed bugs me a bit. Kettering is a good song, but for some reason it doesn't hit as hard as I feel like it could. Maybe it's the mixing, but it doesn't feel impactful enough. Wake is a great penultimate song for the story of the album, but ... read more

FurcornGuy
78

When an album hits me this much emotionally it hurts when I don't give it a 9 or a 10, it's just that it's too sonically ambitious for its own good, only to sound blurry and at some points, empty. I don't know if that was just a limitation of the band's recording equipment but either way I think the writers had a sound in mind that they just couldn't accomplish properly.

Don't get me wrong I love the emotionally charged 2000s indie-rock, and lyrically it's almost flawless, I just think there ... read more

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Track List

1Prologue
2:34
82
2Kettering
5:11
91
3Sylvia
5:27
91
4Atrophy
7:40
85
5Bear
3:53
88
6Thirteen
3:11
82
7Two
5:55
88
8Shiva
3:45
88
9Wake
8:44
90
10Epilogue
5:28
93
Total Length: 51 minutes
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