The Antlers: Burst Apart

After bumming everyone out—in the best possible way—with 2009’s Hospice, Brooklyn trio The Antlers has returned with another batch of richly atmospheric tunes, this time without all that depressing cancer-ward talk. Still, it’s not like frontman Peter Silberman has suddenly decided to use his haunting falsetto to sing about cute kittens and unicorns—in fact, it’s a dog-eat-dog world on Burst Apart, with lines like “I’m not a puppy you take home / don’t bother trying to fix my heart” and “My trust in you is a dog with a broken leg” scattered among sentiments that, regardless of their subject matter, tend to sound ominous when delivered in Silberman’s upper register. Things seem to be completely unraveling from the get-go, as the album opens with “I Don’t Want Love,” and the lines, “You wanna climb up the stairs / I wanna push you back down / But I let you inside / so you can push me around.” But overall, the album’s emotional tone is as subtly complex as the electro-organic music, which easily reaches grand, dramatic heights even while remaining relatively subdued.