Who : The Antlers
Album name : Hospice
Formed : 2006
From : New York City, U.S.
What do they play : Indie rock / indie folk / art rock / dream pop (at least according to Wikipedia)
Release date : March 23, 2009
This is really, really strange, because I am one hundred, no, one million percent certain that I have already written about this record in depth, but I can't find any post in any of my blogs, and nor could I find any email I might've sent to someone where I talked about the album. Now, the other option would be that I wrote it in my previous Instagram account, I remember I did a 30 day challenge where I picked a different song every day that reminded me of whatever the prompt for the day was, and for sure, one of the great tracks from this album - 'Sylvia' - was one of my choices on that challenge. I'm not too sure what I might have written back then, but I'm certain I wrote that it all begins in London.
We travel back to 2007, and it's late July, I guess, when me and my then girlfriend, Silvia, move to London. By then, our relationship was already on the rocks, there were cracks showing up all over the place, and though she knew I'd cheated on her, she still found it in her heart to give one more chance. But our time together there wasn't easy, as I wrote a few months back when I detailed the history of that relationship. I might have said that Silvia and me never had a fight. We never had. In truth, I don't really think I ever had one of those fights that you see in movies, awful affairs that turn into shouting matches, and the plates and the crockery being thrown against the wall. I'm too much of a wimp for that. But in our dynamic, in our own particularly fucked up dynamic, we 'fought' by saying nothing to each other for days on end, sometimes weeks even. We'd go to bed together, sleep together, not say anything, get up, go to work, and rinse and repeat. And that hurt more than any verbal assault hurled my way. I had never realized just how cutting silence could be. Especially because I wanted to break that silence - badly so - and tell her all the things that had been welling up inside of me, tell her I did not want to lose her, tell her how much she meant to me, but also tell her that I needed to feel loved by her, and ultimately... we'd only have those conversations when it was too late to turn back.
When she left me in London, to come back home and work for a prestigious architecture office, I was devastated. London, a city that I love to death, has always made me feel completely alone, and now, without her, that loneliness deepened to a point where I wanted to die. But our story was far from over, and sometime in 2008, I persuaded Silvia to return to London, and after much cajoling and negotiating - aided by the fact that she had been sort of duped about that prestigious job she was offered - she came back, but alas - she wasn't to stay very long, and whatever strains we had put on our relationship, were more deeply accentuated. Very soon we were not talking again, there was too great a distance between us, and we were marching on towards the inevitable end of us.
One of the things that saved me was music. I was downloading and torrenting like there was no tomorrow, and at some point I had a 1 TB hard drive full with music. I made it a point to listen to at least a couple of different records every single day - usually during my commute to work, and believe you me... I listened to a lot of crappy music. Bands that were decidedly quirky and whose music was not for me. I'm looking at you, Marmaduke Duke and Dananananaykroyd.
I also had a weekly ritual, or I should say, mostly weekly because it always hinged on whether I could afford it or not, and that was doing the rounds of my favourite record shops. That included going to Camden and Notting Hill Gate to go to the second hand stores, and then to the big stores, your Virgins, your HMVs, your Towers, but also - and this was decidedly the high point of that ritual - that meant going to 'Sister Ray', quite likely my favourite record store. They have a huge selection of everything, and I bought many a record from them. And one of the records that I found through them was something that they were playing one day at the store. You know when you hear something for the first time, and you have no idea who it is, or what they're saying, but deep down you understand that they're speaking directly into your soul? There was a rather pretty girl at the store, and she was behind the counter and I'd already risked her wrath and eternal ridicule some time back when I inquired which song by 'The Strokes' we were listening to, and she just looked at me and said '....it's Phoenix'. Having decided that the reward was indeed greater than the risk, I asked her what we were listening to, and she said - very politely - that we were listening to a band called 'The Antlers'. I bought the album there and then - on vinyl, and I no longer have that version, it was sold off years ago with the collection I had at the time. Bear in mind that I didn't even have a turntable back then, I was just collecting. My version of the record came with one of those download codes, and as soon as I left the record store, I was initiating the download. And this being still the 3G era, eh, it wasn't as fast as it is now. I got on the bus and went back home, and all the while I was sat listening intently, raptly, at that music - I had a really good pair of Sennheiser headphones, so the music came through crystal clear. By the time I got to the third song, I started crying.
'Hospice' tells the story of a healthcare worker at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and a female patient who has terminal bone cancer. The songs detail their romance, the downward spiral they both fall into, because of the nature of the relationship, and it being tinged by Sylvia's - the main character - traumas, fears and the pain the cancer wreaked on her failing body. As you may understand, this isn't easy stuff to listen to. This is deep, this is poetic, and this is messed up. This is human, all too human. That third song I mentioned, it's called 'Sylvia', and it's a song that begins slow, burns into a fiery crescendo at the chorus, mellows out, and ends in a cathartic confession from the despairing hospice worker :
'Sylvia, can't you see what you are doing? Can't you see I'm scared to speak, and I hate my voice because it only makes you angry.
Sylvia, I only talk when you are sleeping. That's when I tell you everything, and I imagine that somehow you're going to hear me..."
I know I used this bit in a previous post, I know. But the very first time I listened to this song - and I mean listen listen - and especially this last bit... I knew that some soul out there understood me, understood my heart, my pain, my misery, my being incapable of speaking to the woman I loved because I was afraid my voice would make her mad. And it's a funny thing : though I've listened to this record god knows how many times, it's still the only record of theirs that I've ever listened to. And that's because I'm really and truly afraid that everything else by them just doesn't hold up and somehow affects my appreciation of this record. The same thing happened with Mount Eerie, and I have a bunch of bands where I only know the one album from them.
It should be pretty obvious by now that I love this record, from beginning to end. Maybe because there's a personal connection, I don't know, maybe because this is one of the rare records where I feel the music is telling a story that completely relates to what I was going through at the time. It's one of the very few records I know would be a desert island disc. This one could only get a ten out of ten Sylvias.
Just to wrap up this rant, what moved me to write this post was me returning to it last evening. I had not listened to it in full in a few years now, and as I kicked back in bed, ready to relax, I got it spinning next to me. I lay in the dark, silent, immersing myself in that world again. I ended up talking about Silvia with someone who I love with all my heart, and I told her that I knew the exact moment when I realized I didn't feel love for Silvia anymore. And that moment never came for my love for the person I was talking to. It endures, it burns eternal. After listening to the record, and sure I'd already written this story before, I did a search through my archives to look for it, and found nothing. What I did find were still some emails we exchanged - and some records of instant messages as well - and they were all mostly from the final months of our relationship, and good god, I know that we shared a very great love once upon a time, but the pain, the pain... if these had been letters, I am certain the words would have been smudged with my tears. There's much I can't remember now, because thankfully it's all in the past, but going through these emails was excruciating. Some of them brought me back to the exact moment they were written and my heart was rent in twain.
Something I wrote back in late 2010 was this :
'You know... I feel like I'm your enemy. I feel incapable of waking in you whatever it is that's necessary for you to become what I want the most. I feel empty without your love, Silvia.
And it''s all I want... it's all I need... and no matter what I do, or say, we only manage to drift further away from each other.
I carry a pain inside my heart, one I feel on a daily basis. Sometimes, during the course of my day, and sometimes multiple times a day, my heart aches and aches so much, that all I can do is sit on the corner and cry.
It aches because I don't have you. It aches because I don't feel your love. It aches because I'm feeling increasingly helpless in trying to get you to show me your love for me.
It hurts, Silvia.
Tell me what I can do to feel your love again. Please.'
When I finally, finally felt free from the crushing weight that was that one-sided love I carried with me, I swore to myself that I would never again put myself in such a vulnerable position. That never again I would beggar for love, that never again would I implore for affection. Not long after that, I found myself in such a position again, and look at me, we're almost at the end of 2024 and I still find myself begging for something I will never have.
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