There are probably things about the show worth complaining about, but sometimes, a show feels gentle and refreshing enough that you don’t really feel like clinging onto any of it. To Silberman, those songs aren’t shameful - they’re just a group of friends he just doesn’t fit in with right now. This still didn’t inspire him to play anything from Uprooted or In the Attic of the Universe - the two pre- Hospice records that Silberman recorded when The Antlers was a solo project - but it was refreshing to see a musician approach music he no longer connects with in such an empathetic and open-hearted way. Most would stop there, but he went on to compare the songs to friends, with the act of building a setlist coming close to finding ways to mix friends from earlier in your life with newer friends - which, in turn, still presents an opportunity to spend time with those old friends in a new and different context. When people began shouting out old, obscure songs for them to play, it led him to explain that those old songs were difficult to find room for in their current setlists because he didn’t feel like he was the same person he was when he wrote them.
What felt so interesting is that though Silberman is reliably one of the most soft-spoken musicians I’ve ever seen live, he still has plenty of charm and charisma. Even those moments, though, felt like they were perfectly placed, giving us small bursts of manageable excitement that wouldn’t ruffle the feathers of the totally-seated audience, and that reminded everyone that though The Antlers have made room to be a bit softer, it doesn’t mean they’ve gone soft. Silberman must be doing a little better than he used to be, though, as they still found moments for their guitars to get just a little bit noisier, their outros just a tiny bit closer to the quasi-shoegaze walls of sound they trafficked in back in their heyday. “No Widows” and “Bear” didn’t shred in the same ways they used to, but their slightly more muted renditions felt like breaths of fresh air in a time of great chaos. Though the show spent half of its time on the songs of Green to Gold - seven of its 10 songs were played throughout the set - they still had time to air out some beloved tracks from Hospice, Burst Apart and Familiars, finding space for the tracks that fit with their gentler aesthetic and gently transforming the ones that didn’t. Was this a subtle nod to the fact that the album could easily be described as “background music”? A more cynical writer might think so - but Green to Gold deserves better than such cynicism. The gentleness still wins out, though, and not just in terms of music: the band performed with a network of leaves and branches projected over them, serving as both backdrop and obfuscation of those onstage, as though the musicians and their environment had become intertwined.
#Come a little bit closer song full
All of that came to mind during their performance at Aladdin Theater, which saw the two-piece version of the group from the Hospice anniversary tour expanded to a full band complete with a drummer and a keyboard player. It’s a record as breezy as a summer’s evening, but rather than coming across as boring, it lands in the territory of “soothing,” bordering on easy listening or soft rock without the baggage that comes with those descriptors. Green to Gold was the perfect example of a band using their newfound limitations to make something that still felt true to their spirit. They’d return in 2019 for an anniversary tour for their 2009 landmark album Hospice, with stripped-back, acoustic performances to help soothe the “constant blizzard of tinnitus” that has plagued him for so long, and then finally release their first album seven years, Green to Gold, a year ago this week. Over time, though, following the tour for 2014’s Familiars, as frontperson Peter Silberman’s hearing began to deteriorate, his Antlers receded into the background, with rumors of the band’s breakup swirling in the indie press. I first saw them opening for Explosions in the Sky after that album came out, and it was hard to not love their loudness. It has been an unexpected joy to watch how The Antlers have evolved - specifically as a live act, but also as a band - since Burst Apart.