The Antlers are Familiars

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cobl04

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Who's heard this album?

I think Palace is probably the song of the year so far. It's just devastatingly beautiful.

I keep hearing a bit of Electrical Storm in the music though.

The rest of the album... it sounded really nice, but it ran together at times and I have a similar issue with it as I do a lot of Grizzly Bear. It all sounds good, but just fails to make an impact due to solid-but unspectacular vocals and an over-reliance on slow, lush instrumentation. I intend to buy it and hope it grows on me.

What's everyone else think?
 
It's my 6th or 7th favorite album of the year. It seems to be boring a lot of people but whatever, I think it's amazing.
 
I did not like it on first listen, but I'm willing to give a favorite band a few more shots.
 
I like Palace and Hotel but I have to get into the rest, sounds a bit unspectacular to me. I quite liked Burst Apart and I love most of their lyrics. But I really need to be in the right mood to properly listen to an Antlers album.
 
I absolutely love Burst Apart, and so came into this one with high expectations. On first listen, it glistens throughout - beautiful and cohesive. It never really changes tempo, though, and I don't hear anything as immediately gripping as Parentheses or Every Night My Teeth Are Falling Out. I need to go through it a few more times.
 
It means you should probably hear it more than once before declaring that you dislike it. :wink:
 
Psh, details.

Maybe I'll rock it while I drive around virtual Chicago and take on the gangs tonight.
 
Hotel and Palace are both sublime. The rest needs a good concentrated listen I think. It just floats by as background music.
 
^ Doppelganger is a clear highlight for me, along with those two.

And I'm really starting to love the closing few tracks. The album has a very subtle emotional curve about it (the Antlers are a storytelling band even when it's not overt) that makes the ending feel very satisfying.
 
Anyone else feel like this album was made in Twin Peaks?

Sent from my 831C using U2 Interference mobile app
 
The rest of the album... it sounded really nice, but it ran together at times and I have a similar issue with it as I do a lot of Grizzly Bear. It all sounds good, but just fails to make an impact due to solid-but unspectacular vocals and an over-reliance on slow, lush instrumentation. I intend to buy it and hope it grows on me.

hahaha so I finally sat down with the album properly (ie on a bed, lyric booklet, several drinks at hand) and I had completely forgotten I made this thread, so I was going to post in RMT but thought I'd do a search first, and I was going to make pretty much the same comment that I made here!!

It is a lush album, really quite lovely, but it's just not that inspiring. I still hold that "Palace" is one of the very best songs of the year, I wrote in my blog that it reminds me of The National, in the way that their best melancholic songs slowly build and swell to a beautiful climax. It mines similar lyrical themes to "Mistaken for Strangers" but differs from that track in that it offers a bit of hope at the end.

But the rest of the album just doesn't reach those heights for me. It is all one-paced, and yes, still reminds me of Grizzly Bear, another band who I would love to love but just can't, because that slow, stately music begins to lose its lustre when it continues for 45+ minutes.

I'm not big on Silberman's vocals, I love the moments when he lets loose, but they seem to come about once every 15 or so minutes, which is a shame. I found the lyrics to leave a lot to be desired. There are some odd allegories to be found on this record, and they seem to lack subtlety; Doppelganger, Intruders and Director in particular, and then you have quite a lot of lyrical content devoted to run-down houses, which wears a bit thin. The constant switching between regular and italic font in the lyric booklet suggests the lyrics are to be taken as prose or poetry, but I don't think many of the songs are strong enough lyrically to justify that. (Hotel in particular seemed a crap lyric.)

That all said I am a bit drunk and I'm probably just being "friggin cobbler". Aside from Palace, I will say that I really, really enjoyed Director and Refuge, but if I dig deeper into this band I hope to find records with a little more variety from all standpoints.
 
You should listen to Hospice. It's easily their best album. It is completely different to Familiars though. None of the lush production but it does have the best songs and also the best lyrics. It's a concept album about a doctor falling in love with his terminal patient. Some of the lyrics are really heartbreakingly beautiful.
 
Just don't expect a lot of variety from that one either. I haven't heard anything prior to Hospice so I can't judge those, but The Antlers have been a really low-key band for a while now.
 
Burst Apart has a fair amount of variety, I would say. Every Night My Teeth Are Falling Out is probably the hardest-rocking song I have heard from them.
 
Burst Apart was great because it was so different from Hospice. And yes, it had a lot of variety. I feel like Familiars is just another retread of what they tried to do with Burst Apart, and since I don't feel like their was much growth, and nowhere near the number of standout tracks, I just can't say much good about Familiars. It just doesn't do it for me. Not that I want to be a broken record about that in this thread, Lord knows I hate it when people harp on about how much they hate certain other albums by bands that this forum may or may not be dedicated to.
 
There's about as much variety on Burst Apart as there is on...Boxer, maybe? Enough to not be bored, but not enough to say it has a lot of variety.

But yeah, Familiars is probably their most static. Not a problem for me though because I love the sound they're working on that album.
 
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