Oh shit son

Review:

If you have heard of The Antlers, chances are you know what Hospice is. If you don't, here it is. Hospice is a concept album that revolves around a man who works at a hospital (the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center), and the woman who he meets, treats and falls in love with. Not only does the woman he meets have cancer, but she is also very emotionally damaged as well.

(Please bear in mind that this is mostly the meanings I get from the songs, not the actual ones)

The album starts off with, what else, a "Prologue". An instrumental track that automatically sets the somber mood of the rest of the album. As soon as you listen to it, you can feel the happiness just drift away. You can just tell the rest of the album will not be upbeat in the least. Next is "Kettering". The lyrics tell of the first meeting of the man and woman, and how he immediately warmed up to her, although the same can't really be said about her. He talks about how others say that the woman wasn't going to last very long, but he didn't listen, or care.

Track number three, "Sylvia", is telling of the poet Sylvia Plath and her fashion of suicide."Sylvia, get your head out of the oven" is a pretty powerful line, although taken out of context, or the song at least, it doesn't do as much as it should. The lines about Sylvia screaming and fighting is also, I think, about the woman fighting with the man, as we see such things happening later on in the album. When I first listened to this album, I really didn't know what this song had to with the rest, but I guess you really need to look into these things before they make complete and total sense. "Atrophy" is a quiet song compared to "Sylvia", and much, much sadder. It tells of how the woman is essentially taking control of the man. She treats him badly, when all he's trying to do is help her get better. In the final lines of the second verse, he even tells of how he'd "take all those bullets inside you and put them inside of my self", just showing how much he loves this woman, despite all of her abuse. She's always in pain, and he just wants to help her, but can't.

Onto "Bear". This is the last of the happy songs, so to say. Everything goes downhill from here. For the characters in the story, I mean. The "happy" couple learns that they are pregnant. Isn't that great? They think so, so the celebrate and everything is fine. But then, the realization. They are fine with taking care of a child, "finding food for him to eat", and all that good stuff. Thing is, they don't know what will happen to them personally if they have this kid. They decide abortion would be best. Except it isn't. They are now "bigger strangers than [they've] ever been before", and what happens next is only going to worsen things. "Thirteen" is mostly instrumental with two short verses near the end. This time it is from the woman's point of view (vocals by Sharon Van Etten), and she is only asking if the man can help her and "stop this all from happening".

"Two" is one of my favorite tracks on this album. Stating out with a doctor telling the man that there is nothing else he could do to help the woman he had fallen in love with, it moves on to the man going into the woman's room and listening to her tell of a dream she had had. A dream that seems like it had actually happened to her in the past. We go back to him, and he tells us about how they moved in together, and she had continued with the abuse. He didn't even mind the abuse, and he would do to try and help her. The 'Two" in the song is the the man and the woman. "Two people believing that I'm the one to blame", meaning the two of them blaming the one. "Two different voices coming out of your mouth", meaning the two sides of the woman. "Shiva" is the first of the trilogy of horribly sad songs at the end of this album. The man is now broken and depressed. The woman whom he had loved and taken care of for more than a year had died, and he doesn't feel like he can do anything else for the hospital, or himself.

"Wake". "Wake" is a total punch to the gut. The man has lost his job. He stays alone in his home, in the dark. He doesn't even want to associate with other people. He wallows around in his house, in his sadness, and doesn't bother even trying to make things better. All the time he spends though, the sadness disappears when he realizes that he didn't kill the woman. He knew she wouldn't last long, and so did she. It's not his fault. He did the best he could. "Don't ever let anyone tell you you deserve that." Here we go. This is it. "Epilogue". The grand finale. This song is a nightmare. Literally, though. It's the man's nightmare in which he is in bed with the woman, whom he tries to wake, to no avail. He soon is transported to the morgue of the hospital, and workers start to bury the two of them together. He tries to save her, like he did when she was alive, but again, this does not work. He wakes up, and realizes that she hasn't been there for a good while, now. She regularly"visits" him, either as a ghost or in his dreams, but regardless of what she is now, he doesn't seem to enjoy it as much as the real thing.

So that's the story of the album. I really hope you were listening to it as you read. Or at least listen to it later on. This is an album that I think everyone in the world should listen to. It's pure emotion is one of the main reasons I love it so much.

Individual track ratings:

Prologue: 9/10

Kettering: 9/10

Sylvia: 8.5/10

Atrophy: 9/10

Bear: 10/10

Thirteen: 8/10

Two: 10/10

Shiva: 10/10

Wake: 9.5/10

Epilogue: 10/10

The album as a whole, it just completely kills your happy mood that you had before starting. In a good way. My favorite by The Antlers, though "In The Attic of the Universe" comes in a very close second. I give it a 10/10, no question about it. Regardless of the almost non-existent down times it has, it still works together very well and does not disappoint. Bam.