In high school I volunteered at a hospice. I was terrified (which is why I volunteered in the first place) but after a few weeks I was comforted that everyone I met there, all elderly, seemed to have made peace with their death. Then, for the first time, I worked with a middle-aged patient with a family and a job, the basic on-going business of life, and from her deathbed she told stories, laughed and cried in the tiniest voice to whomever was in the room. An hour-long meditation on loss, The Antler’s Hospice captures that wild desperation which plays so lonely and quietly. It succeeds because it feels intensely personal while aiming for mood over prosaic specifics and obscuring its sentimentality with noise.After short opening mood piece ‘Prologue’ gets the listener in an appropriately gloomy mindset, ‘Kettering’ creeps out of the fog. The song, like the best here, is built on repetition. An eerie piano figure provides a malevolent tension for Pete Silberman’s ghost-like vocals to crawl over before running into a wall of guitar, strings and martial drums that build to a small crescendo before dissipating to reveal the piano figure again. Silberman sings in a pinched, soft falsetto that sounds dramatic and haunting but never melodramatic. ‘Kettering’ is about someone’s hospice stay and seems to come from a broken-heart, but the song is fascinating because Silberman’s delivery makes the doctor-patient, lover-beloved relationship sound so mutually parasitic and creepy.Much of the album favors this ambiguity over the messy details of break-ups or death (or maybe both, it’s hard to know how much the two are conflated here and that’s part of the charm). Hospice is evocative of grief and bitterness and as such it ultimately works best a whole. Silberman mines much the same bedroom songwriter territory as Bon Iver , while the band smartly adds a layer of discord that lends the music mystery and a cinematic scope. If it has a flaw, it’s that too few of the songs stick with you. But often, just when the songs are blending together, a moment of pure, elegant beauty pulls you back in, as on the piano on ‘Atrophy’ and the horns on ‘Sylvia’ and ‘Shiva.’ Beyond those small transcendant moments, ‘Two,’ a mesmerizing six-minute repetition of a simple, pretty melody given shifting emotional layers by a backdrop of guitars, drums, horns and piano that builds and fades, stands out. Silberman goes from sweetly nostalgic to resentful and everywhere in-between, while the unchanging tune brings us closer and closer to the end. 'Two,' which easily could have been maudlin in lesser hands, is a lot like Hospice as a whole: a spectral, messily humane work that is as sophisticated as it is affecting.

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