The Antlers – Burst Apart

It’s pretty safe to assume that the opening sentence of almost every single review of Burst Apart is going to include a reference to Hospice, signalling the start of a lengthy comparison between what was widely considered to be a lofty and emotional juggernaut with its eagerly anticipated follow up. After any breakout success album, people wait with bated breath to see whether the band will go back to the same well again, crack under their own pressure, or come back with something wildly different, new, and exciting (or some combination of any of these outcomes). But when you’ve written an album-long metaphoric story of a relationship torn apart by terminal cancer, the question becomes more pointed: The Antlers simply couldn’t repeat the winning formula of their most popular record, making the transition to whatever came next all the more interesting.

The Antlers - Burst Apart

So one of the most immediately reassuring and refreshing things about Burst Apart (in so far as these sorts of things can be referred to as ‘reassuring’ or ‘refreshing’) is that The Antlers’ somber atmospherics weren’t born of their use of morbid cancer chat so much as the music itself. Stripped of the evocative buzzwords of terminal illness, The Antlers still channel a tone of sadness through their sparing employment of instrumentation and, of course, Peter Silberman’s distinguished vocal. Switching from an eerie and haunting (yet beautiful) falsetto to a more well-projected note of desperation with remarkable versatility, we’re relieved to hear that The Antlers weren’t using the cancer as a crutch; that they can still craft a perfectly engaging sound without the aid of overtly downbeat rhetoric.

Whilst, by virtue of shedding their drastic lyricism, Burst Apart feels significantly more invigorated and colourful than its predecessor, that’s not to say they’ve thrown their musical blueprints out with the old lyrics sheets. The vast majority of these songs – as on Hospice – are constructed primarily from repetition. Silberman crafts himself a mnemonic snatch of lullaby melody, and strings it out over the course of several minutes, while the textures of the instrumentation subtly shift and evolve below the vocal line. Take early album cut ‘Parenthesis’ as a textbook example of the album’s general formula: an ethereal falsetto line soaring across the bed of instrumentation; melting into guitar breaks and drum fills as the song ebbs this way and that. On balance, having said all that, this stands as one of the records densest moments, with the vast majority of the record being far sparser and minimalistic than this; a mere breeze of hypnotic loops.

The Antlers are never boring. Colourful, inventive rhythms and emotive soundscapes always prevent this. But the repetition of their formula (a formula which is itself based on repetition) leaves the record feeling a little stuck in a rut from time to time, especially when songs like ‘Every Night My Teeth Are Falling Out’ really blow the doors off of the thing. Sporting more than one vocal refrain, and at least one massive chorus hook (which Silberman really sells), the track really distinguishes itself after a glut of downbeat, minimalistic numbers. After a showstopper like that, the unforgivably turgid ‘Hounds’ sounds all the more drab and aimless in comparison. By the same reasoning, the album exits on a grand note with the one-two of ‘Corsicana’ and ‘Putting The Dog To Sleep’: two more examples of songs which hinge on the widest variation of vocal melody.

I know I’m really baiting a lot of people, who will think that I’ve got this exactly the wrong way about – that the songs I’m identifying as the highlights are the album’s obligatory choons or singles, there to be suffered through in order to get to the richer stuff. However, such a position implies that these tracks are two-dimensional in comparison to the material built of sparse arrangements and looping refrains. This simply isn’t so. As ‘Every Night My Teeth Are Falling Out’ builds to its exhilarating climax of towering guitar lines and overlapping vocal lines, all culminating in one last huge hook, The Antlers prove that indulging themselves in massive textures and powerful vocal lines need not diminish from anything which they achieve with their softer numbers. But these moments of towering brilliance are relatively rare, and the majority of the record is built upon more muted passages of hypnotic wisps – good as far as it goes – but flanked by specks of far loftier achievement.

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