Songs about hospitals, or people in hospitals, or people visiting other people in hospitals carry with them an agonizing sort of heaviness. These kinds of songs are usually a result of some life-changing altercation with body failure or an untimely, unavoidable freak accident - landing someone in the last place that they'd ever want to be, laid up and forced to be cared for, rehabilitated, while those around them are fretting and treating them as if every extra moment is precious and maybe even needs the silent treatment so the damaged soul doesn't get spooked away. New York's The Antlers sink their teeth into this idea of the infirmary as a place for little recklessness, just a temple for looking deep into a person or one's self and extracting much of the pulp, lots of the main wires and circuits and laying them out on the surface in front of them and picking through them - in admiration and amazement - with a fine-toothed comb. It's marveling at all of the haunted and worn out parts. It's emitting a spontaneous gasp of curiosity when a living, carnivorous tumor is pulled out of a head or up and past the throat, out through the mouth. It's seeing the blood and the wriggling pieces, the organs and the objects that have never once seen the light of the day prior to this, out and flopping around like a fish under surveillance - first more frantic and then less so, then despondent or almost resigned to the increasing coldness of their outsides
Songs about hospitals, or people in hospitals, or people visiting other people in hospitals carry with them an agonizing sort of heaviness. These kinds of songs are usually a result of some life-changing altercation with body failure or an untimely, unavoidable freak accident - landing someone in the last place that they'd ever want to be, laid up and forced to be cared for, rehabilitated, while those around them are fretting and treating them as if every extra moment is precious and maybe even needs the silent treatment so the damaged soul doesn't get spooked away. New York's The Antlers sink their teeth into this idea of the infirmary as a place for little recklessness, just a temple for looking deep into a person or one's self and extracting much of the pulp, lots of the main wires and circuits and laying them out on the surface in front of them and picking through them - in admiration and amazement - with a fine-toothed comb. It's marveling at all of the haunted and worn out parts. It's emitting a spontaneous gasp of curiosity when a living, carnivorous tumor is pulled out of a head or up and past the throat, out through the mouth. It's seeing the blood and the wriggling pieces, the organs and the objects that have never once seen the light of the day prior to this, out and flopping around like a fish under surveillance - first more frantic and then less so, then despondent or almost resigned to the increasing coldness of their outsides
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