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. MORE
