The Antler’s “Famil­iars”.

After releas­ing a cou­ple of albums on his own as The Anl­ters, Peter Sil­ber­man was joined by mul­ti instru­men­tal­ist Dar­by Cic­ci and Michael Lern­er on drums, and Famil­iars is the third album from them as a threesome.

The band have fre­quent­ly been joined by fel­low Brook­lyn res­i­dent Sharon Van Etten on back­ing vocals (whose lat­est album is reviewed ear­li­er here), and as you’d expect from their postal address, we’re very much in the beat­ing heart of hip­ster­land here.

What makes the music of The Antlers so engag­ing is their very dis­tinct tone. They craft songs of emo­tion­al hon­esty, naivety almost, and posit them in an expan­sive if minute­ly cul­ti­vat­ed musi­cal land­scape. These are then giv­en body with a suc­ces­sion of unapolo­get­i­cal­ly gor­geous melodies that are draped in Silberman’s sweep­ing, ele­giac vocals.

Some time back­ing vocal­ist Sharon Van Etten.

Though the results are in many ways very dif­fer­ent, it some­how calls to mind Nixon, Lambchop’s sem­i­nal album from 2000. Kurt Wag­n­er and his band though were more clear­ly defined as com­ing under the alt coun­try rubric. The Antlers will only ever be list­ed under Indie. They just man­age to be incred­i­bly melod­ic with­out ever being sac­cha­rine. But best of all, they are unashamed­ly earnest.

There is lit­tle in the way of irony or dis­tance here. All of the sophis­ti­ca­tion is invest­ed in the music. So there’s an emo­tion­al heft to the songs that the sweep­ing melodies only serve to height­en. The boys from Pitch­fork gave it an impressed 7.8 here

And you can see the video for their sin­gle Palace here.

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