listen to this

On March 3rd, Brooklyn-based The Antlers released Hospice, a full two years after their previous full-length album. Self-produced, it’s as good as anything I’ve heard all year (yes, better than Animal Collective), and well worth the wait. I’ve been playing it frequently and fully, as it should be listened. The record is completely realized over ten tracks, which unspool to tell the story of a home-care professional who falls in love with a troubled patient. A meditation on death, attempted suicide, hospital machinery, and ghosts (along with other uppers), these types of downtrodden topics could have easily fallen into an emo-shovelled trench with no hope of getting out. But they don't. Silberman, 22, The Antlers’ frontman, has a vocals style that ranges wildly. He can pull the falsettos of Jeff Buckley, with the sincerity of Wayne Coyne. This, along with the ambient background underlying his lyrics, help make the album play more like fleshed-out novel. The lyrics are haunting, and poetically so (the liner notes are particularly insightful - www.antlersmusic.com/linernotes.pdf). “Bear” and “Two” are probably the standout tracks for me, and I think it’s because they’re a bit more uplifting, at least in their arrangement (even though their subject is so foreboding): “You had a new dream/ And it was just like nightmare/ You were just a little kid/ And they cut your hair/Then they stuck you machines/ You came so close to dying/ They should have listened/ They thought that you were lying/ Daddy was an asshole/ he fucked you up/ Built the gears in your head/ Now he greases them up/ And no one paid attention when you just stopped eating/ 87 pounds! and this all bears repeating.”

It’s powerful, moving stuff, and well worth your time.

The album, in its entirety, is streaming below:

How to Scar a Poor Kid for Life (number 5)

[the Uruk-hai's the least of your problems, kiddo]

5. The Black Hole (1979)

This little masterpiece came out before I was born, but still managed to spread its dark, dark, tentacles throughout my nubile mind. To this day I haven’t been able to gather the strength necessary to re-watch the damn thing. As a SPACE.com article asked, twenty-five years after its original released date: “Does Disney’s ‘The Black Hole’ Still Suck?” I can’t imagine how not.

There’s not a whole lot to say about this Disney crap-fest except that it might be the oddest movie in the studio’s entire, monumental library. From what I can remember (and it’s not much – I must have been five at the time), it’s something of a hybrid between Star Wars and Time Bandits…if both were on a shit-ton of acid. Someone involved (or maybe everyone involved) must have had a raging hard-on for robots because I recall unnecessary reveal after unnecessary reveal where humans are robots, robots are humans, and all these robots chase after everyone else like a pack of dogs in heat. The real monster, sans the robots, is Maximilian Schell, who plays Dr. Reinhart, effectively making Darth Vader look like your grandma. He’s terrifying. I don’t really remember his master plans, but he lives alone on some massive ship orbiting a black hole (hence that creative title), obsessed with reaching the other side in some sort of misguided attempt at attaining immortality. Not really sure who gets paid to write this. Extremely dark, and as I remember it, confusing, the movie was bleak, in that whole “oh-shit-we’re-leaving-the-70’s-and starting-the-depressing-80’s” way. The tagline, “A Journey That Begins Where Everything Ends”, doesn’t even make any fucking sense.

In a lot of ways this movie falls into the same category as Time Bandits (number 8 on my list), which is that it was marketed towards kids, but really shouldn’t have been. It’s just one major pile of unmitigated and unintelligible creepiness. Between this and Terminator 2, the eighties only really convinced me of one thing: stay the fuck away from robots. And consider becoming a neo-luddite.