“Blight” is another painful and painful request for serenity and beauty, a record punctuated by notes as spare as they are erudite. It is yet another act of resistance from a musician who has had to face serious personal difficulties (damage to his vocal cords and hearing loss), who at the same time wonders how much we are fighting to prevent an increasingly probable natural catastrophe.
There is grace and discretion, in “Blight”, enclosed in chords of fingerpicking that dialogue with drips of electronics that never become rain (“Deactivate”), in melodies that with other sound substance could aspire to greater glory and that choose cyclical cadences marked by a synthesizer and moderated by a few piano notes, on which to discuss man's wickedness towards nature, until evolving into an incandescent post-rock apotheosis (“Carnage”).
It is difficult to extrapolate the musical element alone from the lyrical context and the contents always full of profound reflections, but also of contradictions and naivety, which Silberman faces with awareness and with never brutal tones.
Always elegant, rarely scratchy (the title track)the Antlers shake the soul with faint and twilight melodies, tuned with a few crystalline acoustic guitar chords and an instrumental crescendo that returns to the past glorious post-rock pages (the excellent “Pour”).
Silberman's voice is a whisper, a whisper, a concentration of uncertainties and comfort contained in one of the most powerful tracks on the album: “Consider The Source”, a spare yet frank and enveloping melody that exudes emotion, entrusted to the tremulous voice and the piano, the same piano which, with equally sweet notes, brings the curtain down on “Blight” accompanied by the roar of the waves and the singing of the birds (“They Lost All Of Us“), until they get lost in the darkness.
PS Available in limited edition with five more songs.
26/10/2025
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
