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.
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.
With a combination of atmosphere and lyricism, The Antlers’ Hospice is one of the best albums of the year so far.
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.
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.
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.
Hospice isn’t uplifting or hopeful it explores themes of dejection through delicate, beautiful sounds.
Somehow, the lighter Hospice gets, the heavier it hits.
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.
Hospice is a fully-realized and fully-functional concept album.
Hospice is a work of rare beauty and a watershed moment in The Antlers’ career.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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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