Track Listing

1. Prologue
2. Kettering
3. Sylvia
4. Atrophy
5. Bear
6. Thirteen
7. Two
8. Shiva
9. Wake
10. Epilogue

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1309 in Music
• Released on: 2009-08-18
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .16 pounds

Customer Reviews

A Terrible Truth
Don't expect an easy or a comfortable listen here.
Give it a chance however and you may open yourself
up to an extraordinary and memorable musical experience.

An album whose central subject is about pain and loss
will not endear it to major industry exposure.
Not that this should concern us. We have our own minds after all.

Peter Silberman and his cohorts Darbi Cicci and Michael Lerner
give us a glimpse behind the curtains of usually private grief.
An album devoted to the experience of losing a loved other to cancer.

Silberman's whole being seems to rise to the challenge
in these 10, often harrowing, compositions.
A voice strained and cracked and bleeding with raw emotion.
Sometimes pouring out of the tangled centre of the mix;
sometimes disembodied and trying to work its way in from the outside;
always focussed, however, and fiercly committed to the terrible truth
of the project's subject. Brave and uncompromising.

A track by track deconstruction would seem somehow
ignoble given the integrity of its creator's vision.
It is a powerfully realised coherent whole. A true labour of love.

There is light and shade even in some of the darkest places however
but the melodic and dynamic variation rarely let's us get too far away
from the suffocating reality of the tragedy unfolding before us.

The song 'Thirteen' is one of the saddest
and most haunting songs I have ever heard.

The unique energy communicated by this wonderful album is unimpeachable.

Essential.

Sickeningly Simple (9/10)
First, The xx gave us the key to unlocking the age of understatement on their eponymous debut, and now The Antlers are here to confirm the power of restraint. Pete Silberman and band form a simple 5-piece. Hospice's 8, one-word tracks are bookended by an instrumental, post-rock prologue and swelling and eye-welling epilogue. Their influences are clean to the point of clinical.

It would have been an easy but poor tribute to have upped the level of Hallmark-like sentiment on Hospice, given its externalisation in music form of the raw emotion felt from losing a loved one. The concentrated catharsis contained in the washing cymbals of `Thirteen' are particularly poignant. Silberman's falsetto flits from an Antony Hegarty-like, soulful cry to a Wild Beasts-like, operatic mew.

Hospice is the sound of simple done sickeningly well. `Atrophy' and `Bear' lift the same sense of piano-built purpose as Spiritualized's stately Songs in A&E. That Silberman mumbles parts of his falsetto on these tracks is all the more compelling. Extended, shimmering instrumentals give way to chilly confessions that evoke the spirit of Bon Iver's For Emma Forever Ago. The hard-hitting key changes in `Sylvia' bring to mind Arcade Fire's best emotive flourishes. The haunting, choral harmonies that drift around the cavernous Hospice seem like embracing angels.

Silberman's trump cards, held against a maudlin backdrop of shivering sorrow, are the rays of sunlight which punctuate the clouds. The unbridled optimism that, for example, cracks the echoing gloom in `Two' is testament to what it is to be human. Hospice is much more than just music. It is the meeting of long-lost friends, the loss of a first love, the desire to be with one's family and that feeling of being lost. We enter the world and most probably leave it in the hospital, and all the moments in between now have a fitting soundtrack.

Profound
This is not an easy listen in the slightest. It opens with a fuzzy swell that feels like the start of something deeply profound. The album pushes through so many different emotions but all of them have a mournful tint thanks to Peter Silberman's breathy and cracking voice crawling out of the centre of the noise. It comes as no surprise that emotion on this scale is the result of absolute tragedy. It is simply the soundtrack to a person's death written after they have gone and every note drips with the pain. It is powerful and rewarding.