The Antlers O2 Academy, Oxford 4/3/10
2/5
By: Liane Escorza
The Antlers are from Brooklyn, and they’re unapologetically serious. They walk against currents, wading through muddy fads and over-sentimental ambience. And it was this disdainful attitude to mediocrity that was what all of us were waiting to hear, considering the universally thumbs-up reviews their Hospice LP has gained of late. We were all ready for something resembling a grand funeral, a show themed on isolation, despair, tension, anger and unwinding coiling. But their supposedly preferred topics of death, solitude and illness must have a totally different meaning to Peter Silberman and his band.
The Antlers played and played. And when I mean played, I mean they stretched and stretched intros and they stretched and stretched ends and they stretched and stretched my patience and usually generous attention span. It all became a sombre and solemn requiem of elongated, infinite hum, with an ever present and pressing hopelessness. There were no explosions, no build-ups, no stumbles, only plateaus, which would start when the bass drum would kick in or when the first guitar string was played at the 00’00” mark.
It was like having the universe downsized, laid out on the stage, and having it display its steady, silent, morbid expansion… but without the stars, the beauty, the many marvels of creation. It was like applying dirty white, then light cream, then light yellow to a blank canvas and never get anywhere in the process nor in the end.
They were however on the brink of something – a little more playing around with space and time in the Antlers equation could have opened up something monumental. Something of black hole proportions. But I wouldn’t want to see how very, very dark that could be.
Artists in this article: The Antlers
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