Photo: Lucy Bridger
"You were simpler, you were lighter, when we thought like little kids," pines Peter Silberman on tonight's opener 'Palace'. And therein lies the essence of The Antlers' sound - embryonic, feather-light and vulnerable. With 14 songs held together by a well-woven web of lacey sounds, tonight is exhibition of the art of delicacy, where the tiniest element is magnified and its beauty explored.
The Antlers have been on a steady ascent for a while now - especially on their last few records. Hospice was one of the achingly-beautiful highlights of 2009 - a concept album about the downward spiral in a romance between a terminally-ill patient and their hospice worker to mirror Silberman’s own gut-wrenching anguish. Then came Burst Apart - arguably the best album of 2011 and the perfect distillation of what the band do: the place where anxiety, ecstasy, paranoia and sadness all meet.
Then this year, the band released the towering Familiars: a miasma of sounds that infiltrate the soul but lift the spirit. A perfect balance of misery and majesty from a band in their prime. This is the version of The Antlers on showcase tonight.
The fog of horns, soft strings, meandering bass and haunting howls that make up newer tracks 'Doppelganger', 'Intruder' and 'Hotel' paint a dreamy landscape for the more familiar characters on 'Kettering' and 'No Widows' to stride across. The magnificence of the Hackney Empire is the scene, as the cinematic melodrama of 'Director', 'I Don't Want Love' and 'Putting The Dog To Sleep' drive the vivid action of a man torn inside out.
Surrendering themselves entirely to the music, the band's presence is nothing short hypnotic, and thankfully enough to distract from the relentless inane chatter of tossers in the wings. True, outing 'Two', 'Sylvia', 'Every Night My Teeth Are Falling Out' and/or 'Rolled Together' would have pushed the set over the line into perfection, but The Antlers certainly did enough in terms of curating the fitting, understated soundtrack to the stage they're at now. You could say 'less is more', but that would do an incredible disservice to the entire world they've created: simple but sublime.
The Antlers played:
Palace
Doppelgänger
Intruders
Hotel
Kettering
No Widows
Director
Revisited
Parade
I Don't Want Love
Surrender
Putting the Dog to Sleep
Encore:
Refuge
Epilogue
