The Top 50 Albums Of 2011: #1

#1
The Antlers
‘Burst Apart’
(Transgressive)

It’s a grey day in Williamsburg, the burgeoning artistic centre of New York. Though the rain intermittently drives down onto the low-rise residential streets beneath the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway – a sort of motorway -on-stilts that cuts through the neighbourhood- there’s no real atmosphere of gloom. Chiefly, it’s because The Antlers are celebrating. But also it’s because gloom isn’t as big a part of frontman Peter Silberman’s vocabulary anymore.

“I don’t think of it as a sad song, I think of it as an assertive, independent song,” he says of ‘I Don’t Want Love’, the soaring-yet-understated opening suite of his band’s exceptional ‘Burst Apart’ album. “In one way it’s the opposite of a song that says, ‘I’m so lonely, I want somebody’. Instead it’s saying, ‘I don’t need anybody, I’m fine on my own.’”

Over coffees and burgers, lyricist, guitarist and frontman Silberman, multi-instrumentalist Darby Cicci and drummer Michael Lerner are reacting to the “surprising, exciting and flattering” news that they have been voted our number one album of the year. For them, the accolade is enhanced by the fact that this is the first album that they have written collectively as a three-piece (though ‘Burst Apart’ is technically the fourth Antlers record, the first three saw Silberman solely as the auteur, with Cicci and Lerner his supporting cast). It also immediately follows the cult success of ‘Hospice’; a concept record – and a desperately dark, heartache-ridden one at that– that likened the difficult end of a relationship to the interaction between a hospital worker and a terminally ill patient. So er, though mesmerising, it wasn’t much of a laugh, all-in-all.

“For the past couple of years I was characterized as a very depressive person,” grins Peter, pausing, then conceding; “Maybe back then I was, but [‘Burst Apart’], for me, was about bridging the gap between the two things; recognizing that I’m a much happier person. That’s why the record opens with ‘I Don’t Want Love’. It’s a record about trying to understand life and yourself and being a person that is not necessarily sure what they’re doing all the time – one who has complicated relationships – but it doesn’t necessarily have to be as sad. I think we were – and we continue to be – exhausted by that idea.”
It’s hardly a healthy template for making music, either. If The Antlers’ were to try and delve into a new mine of darkness each time they wanted to make a record, we’d probably not get to hear another one. Ever.

“I had definitely felt this temptation to fuck up my personal life in order to fuel the process,” Peter admits. “I mean, I haven’t done that, but I remember when we were making ‘Burst Apart’ being like, I just wanna write about what’s been happening for the past couple of years, but it’s only subtle stuff, it’s not quite as dramatic, not quite as harrowing. But maybe it should be! Maybe that was the most interesting thing about us in the first place!”

‘Hospice’ certainly delivered a very specific, and very forceful, emotional blow. Listening back to it now is a suffocating experience; a vulnerable and numb Silberman sits at its centre, almost clawing at the sleeve of the listener, desperate to impart the minutiae of his most intimate personal turmoil. Given the resonance it had with so many equally tortured fans, the band must have been burdened by the possibility that the next album might not necessarily pack the same therapeutic hit. More specifically, the kind of weepy, moping people who might have obsessed over it are just the kind to post really arsey blasts of vitriol on message boards when the next step isn’t in the direction they think it ought to be.

“Yes,” says Michael, dryly. “We’re aware of that. But there’s nothing  you can do.”
“We didn’t want to freak out about catering too much for those people,” says Silberman, “but we didn’t want to alienate people who had been supportive of us either. We wanted to bring them along with us. It didn’t have to be combative; it didn’t have to be ‘Here’s something you’re gonna hate.”

And, when they found the right middle ground, Michael reveals, the moment was a revelation. “The one day when it really clicked was a really exciting day. We turned on the overhead speakers on the other side of the studio that we don’t usually use, and there was one song – ‘No Widows’, I think – and I just thought, fuck, this record’s good now. That’s it. It was something of a relief.”
“I feel that the strength of this band is not working to a blueprint,” says Darby. “It comes from the the way the three of us play instruments. We’re not thinking  about playing a part per se – not something you could write down on a piece of paper and hand to someone else to do – but we are thinking about our instruments in terms of their whole palate of sound.”

It’s this focus on energy rather than boring technical gubbins that allows ‘Burst Apart’ to really flourish. While Michael even uses that most dreaded of adjectives – “organic”. Yet, in the context of a record as classy, as graceful and arresting as this, The Antlers’ flowery language and artistic intensity is more than justifi ed. They are, after all, discussing an album that has an atmosphere that’s as tangible as a wispof smoke. Honourably, throughout our chat, they remain very much the right side of pretentious. “You have to know where the line is,” Peter says. “Is this enjoyable to listen to, or is it just weird for the sake of being weird? I like to think we’ve done a good job.”

To be honest, Peter, with ‘Burst Apart’ , the three of you have done a little better than that.