I’ve had this song queued up and ready to post for about six months. I think about posting it about once a week but always file it away for future use because it seems like the mood has to be just right. This is an intense song, off of a very serious, tightly structured album.

“Hospice” is a narrative in full color 3-D. It’s so vivid that I swear while listening to the album, you can smell that dank, disinfectant, sickly, musty, uncirculated air that is common to hospitals. I have a like/don’t like relationship with this album and band. The whole of this album is catharsis through musical artistry. The amount of sorrow in tone and lyrical content is epic. It’s what makes the album good, even great according to many-a musical critic and fan. To me, the level of grief is what also makes it hard to listen to. The world, and my musical tastes are not and don’t have to be all rainbows and butterfly kisses but this album is so into morbid, self loathing that I have to psyche myself up to listen to it.

Everyone should grieve and treat the death of a loved one as the horrific moment in life that it is, but for me, The Antlers are wallowing in death and misery to the point where I think that they embrace it as a thing to be cherished. There’s no redemption, or moving forward in this album. Bitterness, anger, and regret are present in heaping quantities. Lead singer Peter Silberman often lends his voice to his dying partner and speaks for her but there are never any comforting words from her to him.

If you’re in a relationship that is difficult, even without factoring the massive circumstance of the other person being terminally ill, you are obviously a commendable person if you see it through to the end. I guess that’s where Silberman’s haunted misery is coming from. To me, this relationship doesn’t sound like it ever had any potential to be a joyous, long lasting, loving union, even if the illness were not present. But, Silberman committed to it, saw it through, and the world got “Hospice” as its result.

- DAVE