The Antlers Press Kit

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Post Hoc Management
750 Grand Street, #7S
Brooklyn, NY 11211
+1 718 369 4544 office Dawn Barger
+1 718 408 9504 fax
dawn@posthocmanagement.com
posthocmanagement.com
The Antlers
Press Kit
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June!22,!2014!
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June!17,!2014!
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June!8,!2014!
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First Listen: The Antlers, 'Familiars'
by STEPHEN THOMPSON
The 2009 album Hospice sparked a major breakthrough for The Antlers, but it's not the
sort of success a band would want to duplicate, even if it could. As the title
suggests, Hospicewas built around a dark unifying theme — an examination of the
events surrounding the slow death of singer Peter Silberman's friend — so the record
comes by its desolate, life-and-death intensity honestly. But it was hard to imagine at
the time how the Brooklyn trio would make another record, let alone carve out a longterm career.
Burst Apart, from 2011, did its job surprisingly effectively, maintaining the swelling
melancholy while letting its subject matter sprawl out beyond grief. Familiars is even
better: Each of its deliberately paced songs sprawls to between five and eight
minutes, and each takes a thoughtful journey in the process. Ever more sure-handed
and ambitious in its arrangements, the band crafts gorgeous backdrops for Silberman,
whose soaring falsetto periodically brings to mind Jeff Buckley.
For all its bruised grace, Hospice isn't an easy record to revisit: Its rawness isn't the
stuff of everyday moods. Familiars takes many of that great record's strengths — its
emotional openness, its rich sound, its mix of subtlety and grandiosity, its funereal
beauty — and expands on them in a more approachable, less punishing setting. It's
still informed by loss, but also by the fact that life has been going on ever since.
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June!2014!
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June!18,!2014!
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The Antlers have grown up in their own way: slowly. The project’s first full-band
effort, 2009’s Hospice, followed two collections of roughshod solo material from lead
vocalist Peter Silberman, records that sounded as if he were fumbling in the
dark; Hospice, then, was light making its way into the room, a collection of indie rock
that drew from the sounds you’re likely to find on an iPod owned by someone in their
mid-20s—sparkling chamber-pop, angsty, emotive vocal surges, gaping shoegaze
guitars. Two years later, they returned with Burst Apart, a transitional effort that
found the Antlers getting weirder, incorporating the kind of saucer-eyed ambience
familiar to anyone who’s ever heard Sigur Rós in a smoke-filled dorm room.
If Burst Apart was the sound of the Antlers dipping their toes into unfamiliar waters,
on the following year’s mini-LP Undersea they took the plunge: notions of
immediacy and concision were discarded, replaced by a slow-handed approach to
space rock that valued detail over the type of explicit melodicism showcased in their
earlier work. In opposition to the music that was being put forth, the shift
on Undersea was startling, bold, and more than a little brave. By industry standards,
the Antlers were growing—Undersea was their first release for Anti-, a significant
step up in visibility from their previous label, NYC-based farm-team indie
Frenchkiss—but as the lights were increasingly trained on them, the band managed
to find their own darkened corner in the musical landscape. Hospice could sound like
the work of a band that was very good at sounding like other bands; Undersea was
the point at which the Antlers found themselves. Familiars, the Antlers’ first fulllength in three years, confirms that they are operating in their own zone. They’ve
doubled down on Undersea’s somnambulant moodiness and increased focus on
atmosphere, resulting in their longest, most subtle release.
As with every Antlers record since Hospice, Familiars was self-produced, and the
group’s collective ear for texture continues to take hold as its own expressive
instrument. As ever, drama is in no short supply either. Silberman’s lyrical
predilections, in particular, have long possessed an emotional scope that speaks to
the honest naiveté associated with stumbling through your young
adulthood: Hospice essentially compared love and loss to a children’s cancer
ward, Burst Apart was all house fires and metaphors for sexual frustration,
andUndersea explored the age-old concept of water-as-emotional metaphor. In
an interview with Pitchfork, Silberman name-checked filmmaker Gaspar Nóe’s trippy
opus Enter the Void, a movie that treats death as an orgasmic act of self-exploration,
as one of a few inspirations for Familiars’ funeral-pyre slow-burn. “There are
different ways to look at death,” he said, “and they don’t have to be depressing at all.”
In that same interview, Silberman claimed that the Antlers are frequently pegged as a
“sad band,” and while no one will mistake the breathy ruminations of Familiars as
“happy music,” the record’s instrumentation has a transcendent brightness, not
unlike what you might see when closing your eyes after staring into the sun for too
long. The spacious lope of “Intruders” is made up of muted guitar stabs and
molasses-slow drum work, surrounded by heavy swirls of space and dotted with the
occasional horn and keyboard flourish; “Surrender” rests itself on a gently
descending guitar figure that, at the six-minute song’s midpoint, reaches upwards to
impossible heights before dissolving in pedal-abused piano and horns soaked in
warmth.
Whether they’re reaching above their heads or to the deepest depths,
on Familiars the Antlers are even more concerned with catharsis, resulting in a
string of patient, beatific crescendos. (The word “patient” is, at this stage of the
Antlers’ career, operative: only two of Familiars’ 10 songs finish before reaching the
five-minute mark.) The elegiac “Director” spends its first two minutes and change
moving at the pace of a burning stick of incense, as Michael Lerner’s brushed
cymbals create a suitable bed for drowsy guitar; then, the weight shifts in the form of
rolling drums and just enough six-string fuzz, evoking the type of soft psychedelia
that Spiritualized have occasionally turned to. Opener “Palace” is essentially fiveand-a-half minutes of declarative melody that comes on strong and stays there
before vanishing completely, while “Revisited” is the record’s torch song—but one
without resolution, as Silberman repeatedly switches between anguished vocals and
receding into the background, breaking into a elliptical guitar solo near the song’s
end that floats above the fizzy electronics.
As a vocalist, Silberman’s never shied away from theatricality; on Hospice’s “Sylvia”,
he seethed and cried to match that song’s bursting guitar burn of a chorus, and every
successive release has seen him expanding his register to match the music’s at-times
skyscraping qualities. On Familiars, Silberman cements himself as one of indie
rock’s most compelling and distinctive singers. He’s capable of projecting a wide,
complex range of emotions—angry and defeated on “Hotel”, cautiously hopeful on
“Intruders”. On the straightforward saunter of “Parade”, he takes on the ruminative
prognostication of someone looking at a yearbook and wondering if the future and
past possess any connection at all.
Lyrically, Silberman’s very much in his therapist’s-couch lane on Familiars, with a
few subtle shifts in his mindset that you’d expect anyone currently reaching the end
of their late 20s to undergo. “Maybe when I’m older,” he optimistically states in the
beginning of “Intruders”, “I’ll be clearer/ More attuned and understanding.” On
“Refuge”, he morbidly turns his gaze to what life’s endgame means—”When you lift
me out of me/ Will I know when I’ve changed?”—but despite that and other brief
meditations on death-as-release, Familiars’ thematic focus is a bit more scattered
than Silberman name-checking The Tibetan Book of the Dead would have you
believe. This time around, the theme he returns to most is identity—who we see
when we look in the mirror, what happens when we don’t recognize who’s staring
back—and on “Intruders”’ emotional peak, he confronts the terrifying possibility of
encountering a dopplegänger with what sounds like murderous intentions: “When
my double scales the wall/ I’ll know exactly where he’s landing/ And I’ll surprise
him.”
Indeed, even as Silberman’s stuck with his most literary affectations—full-sentence
lyrical statements, a heavy reliance on symbolism—he and the Antlers have loosened
in terms of pretense over the last five years, taking on more self-absorbed concerns
as their music has grown more insular and drowsy. The 28-year-old Silberman was
barely of drinking age when he released music under the Antlers guise in earnest,
and in the eight years since he and his band have aged publicly, charting their own
distinct course while making music about the small-scale challenges faced when you
feel truly lost in the world. Against all odds, they’ve become one of the most
interesting indie rock bands working, and the stately beauty of Familiars is the latest
satisfying effort from a band that continues to reward those listeners who give them
the attention their elegant, secretly weird music deserves.
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May!20,!2014!
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The Antlers Seek Peace in the Unknown on
'Familiars'
When Peter Silberman, frontman for the Antlers, read the funerary text Tibetan Book
of the Dead this past fall, he started thinking about people's inner lives: personal
demons, interior dialogues, and the difference between one's past and present
selves. While writing his band's soon-to-be-released fourth album, Silberman
manifested "those different voices as actual characters, as if they're actually talking
to themselves," he says. "It was helpful to characterize different components of
personalities."
If the Antlers' past full-lengths are any indication, Silberman had a lot of mental
anguish to sort through. On the Brooklyn trio's exquisitely depressing 2009
Frenchkiss label debut,Hospice, Silberman compares his then-girlfriend to a dying
patient and himself to her caregiver, while 2011's lush and emotive Burst Apart finds
him trying to peel himself off the floor and understand what went wrong. On the
forthcoming Familiars, due June 17 in the U.S. via Anti-, Silberman aims for some
"earned relief."
His songwriting process was "kind of an investigation into yourself that leaves you
with a sense of peace," he says. "I can really only do that for myself and hope that
translates. That's something a lot of people go through, calling their life and
assumptions about themselves into question."
Lyrics like, "If you're quiet you can hear the monster breathing … Do you hear that
gentle tapping? My ugly creature's freezing," on Familiars' foreboding second track,
"Doppelganger," hint at Silberman's dark sides. The singer explores his vocal range
as well, abandoning his ethereal falsetto to scrape raggedly at his lower range like
Nina Simone, one of his inspirations.
Multi-instrumentalist Darby Cicci, meanwhile, moves away from his hallmark —
gorgeous synthesizer haze — to embrace piano, bass, and jazz studies he hadn't
picked up in nearly five years. "It opens up a new way of thinking about music," Cicci
says, "after you get frustrated with one thing or one style, get in a feedback loop of
sorts."
After experimenting with Cicci's radiant trumpets on 2012's stopgap EP Undersea,
the Antlers wanted a warmer sound indebted to the Memphis Boys' soulful, late-'60s
recordings. They also didn't want to mix another one of their own records, which had
always been "a marathon to the finish" consisting of multiple all-nighters, according
to Silberman.
"It's too hard to go through the creative process and then also have to deconstruct it
in the mixing process," adds Cicci.
So, the Antlers recruited producer Chris Coady (Grizzly Bear, TV on the Radio,
Beach House) for mixing duties. "He's got a huge affection for really crappy effects,
but he knows how to use them so you get beautiful sounds out of cheap equipment,"
Cicci explains. "Gives a lot of grime to things." Using a '70s CBS radio compressor,
Coady lit up Familiarswith a brassy, Motown feel especially obvious on album
standout "Hotel," with its low-down guitar licks and organ-backed breakdown. The
warmer instrumentation contributes to that aforementioned "earned relief."
Still, Silberman clarifies that the LP closes with "not exactly a happy ending" — after
all, what kind of Antlers album would that be? — but one that leaves listeners
peaceful after some self-reflection, rather than lying emotionally drained on the floor.
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June!24,!2014!
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“Sad” is a catch-all we use to describe music that turns inward, reflects and exists
without concern for how its audience is going to feel about what they hear. It is
about expression, relating and both comforting and being comforted. This year
has had no shortage of such, from wounded (Lykke Li, Sharon Van Etten, Beck)
to pensive (Sun Kil Moon, La Dispute) to the talk of the moment, Lana Del Rey.
Speaking with Pitchfork this year, Annie Clark (St. Vincent) described her album
closer “Severed Crossed Fingers” by noting, “I sang that in one fucking take, cried
my eyes out, and the song was done.” And if you really are versed in pain and
need some more advanced product, the freebase of sad, try Lydia Loveless or
Strand of Oaks or Angel Olsen. In terms of self-reflective music, 2014 is a banner
year.
The Antlers’ fifth LP, Familiars, fits neatly in this conversation, which is no
surprise considering their most beloved album takes place in a cancer ward and
their last LP ended with a song called “Putting the Dog to Sleep.” But, to simply
label these nine songs as “sad” is getting stuck in some of the sonic cues (downtempo rhythms, beautiful whining trumpets from Darby Cicci); the album is
ultimately the most cathartic and uplifting that songwriter Peter Silberman has
crafted, indicating the demons he has long wrestled with may be tiring, if not
nearing defeat.
Even at his darkest, Silberman has had a knack for crafting beauty out of pain,
and that’s where “Palace” begins, with the dual reading of losing sight of your old
self or losing connection with a changing love. Either way, the song illuminates
the pedestal we place idealized memories on. But musically, it could be a Disney
ballad, as unmasked heartstring-pulling as you will find west of “Can You Feel the
Love Tonight” and “A Whole New World.” Those songs, jokes aside, are obvious
in their intention to make an audience feel a specific vitality at a certain moment,
andFamiliars finds hope in vitality.
“Hotel” again sees the separation of the past and present versions of who we are,
only to acknowledge that “I keep sleeping with my old self.” The album seems to
allow for multiple readings on this. There is a loss of innocence there, life
weighing down on someone until they are not same person you remember. But,
there is also healing in this change, where past trauma can be put to rest by
leaving your old self behind.
With this kind of weight behind Silberman’s broad yet concrete imagery, it is easy
to read every word as symbolic, whether that is the home invasion vividly
described on the masterful “Revisited” or the titular event on “Parade,” all easy
enough to get the implied double meaning they present. But the songs still work
on some level as literal storytelling, though the audience is unlikely to take that
bait.
So how is this uplifting? Though the songs may seem to be mourning loss of
connection to the past, there is the implication of survival throughout, that being
able to lose connection to the past is a privilege afforded to those who make it.
Others get stuck there, either literally through death or psychologically through
nostalgia. A look around at our present state as Americans sees many of our
friends and peers demonstrating the inability to divorce the present from the
past. Silberman is driven to profanity by his own wars (some of the best uses of
the word “fuck” in song are featured on this album) or often he finds his voice
calling out in desperation, never before sounding as controlled and powerful as
on this album. Coming from a man that said on “Hospice” “we’re fucked and not
getting unfucked soon,” this shift of thinking is virtually inspiring, and not just
for him, but for the possibilities in everyone. The questions he asks
on Familiars never sound self-absorbed and seek as much to relate to others as to
express himself, leading to a conclusion that completes the songwriter’s shift
away from simply being “sad.”
“It’s not our house that we remember, it’s a feeling outside it,” he says on closer
“Refuge,” completing the split from sentimental longing by acknowledging that
we are just looking for a feeling that we once had, whether that was hope,
stability, comfort, safety or whatever else could be evoked from your family
home. “When everyone’s gone but we leave all the lights on anyway,” he adds on,
which is what you do to protect a house. Knowing what to let go of and what to
guard is tricky business, and we all probably still get it wrong, but realizing there
is a distinction is an enlightened, redemptive truth, like the discovery of gray in a
black-and-white world.
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June!17,!2014!
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The Antlers’ frontman Peter Silberman recently compared listening to his old
music, namely 2009’s Hospice, to the jarring experience of “looking at an old
picture of yourself.” In the five years since that album’s release, Silberman, along
with multi-instrumentalist Darby Cicci and drummer Michael Lerner, has
managed to successfully follow it up with 2011’s Burst Apart and 2012’s aquatic
EP Undersea. Now, he admits he can barely recognize the Silberman of just a few
years ago.
Familiars, the band’s fifth full-length, explores that disconnect between past and
present self. Its songs struggle to figure out where things went wrong and attempt
to recognize that stranger in the mirror. Few songwriters are as well-equipped as
Silberman to piece together an all-encompassing narrative. Like he did
on Hospice,an emotionally shattering concept album set in a cancer ward,
and Burst Apart, a lyrical autopsy of a dying relationship, Familiars is also broad
in scope: It aims to come to terms with pain and regret and ultimately move
forward.
Opener “Palace”—featuring twinkling pianos and plaintive horns that breezily
waft in—finds Silberman pining for the past, “Before you were hid into a stranger
you grew into as you learned to disconnect.” “Hotel” shows his need to escape,
while his internal battle is laid out in the most literal terms on “Director.” Finally,
there’s peace made on standout “Parade,” which melodically
echoes Hospice highlight “Bear.” Here, he resolves to “start again, before the
memory of the mess we made.”
Self-recorded and produced, Familiars is enveloped in a warm blanket of lush
pianos, silky jazz-minded guitars, spacey synthesizers, and melancholic trumpets.
The compositions are washed in hazy, but not overwhelming, reverb, maintaining
a weightless, dreamlike atmosphere throughout. It moves from frighteningly
brooding on “Doppelgänger” to a seductive and mournful guitar-based groove on
“Hotel.” Closing with a majestic, horn-led catharsis on “Refuge,” The Antlers
boast the band’s most wonderfully expansive songwriting.
Coming in at an ambitious 53 minutes, Familiars, with its lack of uptempo
tracks, requires relatively patient listening. If it weren’t for its unequivocally
gorgeous and engaging arrangements, the runtime would feel bloated and
overstuffed. But ever since Hospice, Silberman’s enveloping and devastating
attention to detail has required more than just a few casual spins. With this
rewarding album, The Antlers take the band’s wounds and find glimmers of
redemption and hope.
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September!1,!2014!
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April!8,!2014!
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July!9,!2014!
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