SXSW 2010: The Antlers Will Destroy Your World

I have a real hard time listening to The Antlers without crying. OK, that’s a pretty unglamorous confession, but there it is—the band’s 2009 magnum opus, Hospice, is basically a 51-minute emotional sucker punch in the best way possible, which makes it incredibly difficult to listen to in public places. Imagine a super-affected concept album about watching your emotionally abusive lover waste away from cancer, and it sounds like the bastard lovechild of Brian Eno and Grizzly Bear. Yeah.

So there was more than a little bit of trepidation bouncing around in my brainpan as I seated myself on a sun-dappled lawn (next to a dead ringer for the Cobrasnake photographer) to watch The Antlers’ SXSW set at the French Legation Museum. After about a 20-minute delay spent fiddling with their levels, they finally launched into a stripped-down rendition of “Sylvia,” quickly dashing my hopes of keeping those raw emotions at arm’s length. “Sylvia, can’t you see what you are doing? / Can’t you see I’m scared to speak / and I hate my voice ’cause it only makes you angry / Sylvia, I only talk when you are sleeping” wailed frontman Peter Silberman, eyes closed, thrashing on his guitar a like a man possessed.

Next up was “Atrophy,” and then a jangle-less, synth-heavy version of “Two.” If Hospice has a mission statement, this is it: Propulsive kickdrums back this woeful tale of two people falling out of love and into mutual hatred, death looming just around the corner. Then, the wall of noise vanishes and is replaced with a simple synth line, and my world collapses:

Well no ones gonna fix it for us, no one can.
You say that no one’s gonna listen, no one understands.
So there’s no open doors, there’s no way to get though,
There’s no other witnesses, just us two

Ahh, there’s that old-time religion, a tear trailing down each of my cheeks in this moment of fuck-the-world catharsis—one for joy and one for sorrow, since I’ve been on a big duality kick lately. (Which might explain why I cried at a concert for the first time in five years, now that I think about it.)

The truncated set concluded, quite appropriately, with “Wake.” After minutes of slow, mournful drone, the song explodes into joyous riffs that wash over the audience like rays of sunshine: “Don’t ever / let anyone / tell you you deserve that” Silberman whispered, voice cracking. And then, as abruptly as they began, they unceremoniously dropped their instruments and hightailed it off the stage, and let the sound resolve into a heavy, dull drone.

And as I shook myself out of my reverie and turned to leave, it was impossible to ignore the many pairs of eyes even more red and puffy than mine.

The Antlers – “Two”