Hot Lovin’: The Antlers As Music For Sexytime
so hot
Sometimes, the musical accompaniment for coitus is selected to set the mood. Sometimes – as with my Magnetic Fields example – it’s mainly selected so that your roommate doesn’t have to hear the sound you make when you have an orgasm. This is another example of the latter.
The new album from The Antlers, Hospice, was released recently. Every review that I’ve skimmed across alludes to the fact that it’s a pretty serious album – a concept piece about hospitals or bears or something like that (or a very melodramatic person running an extended metaphor about being dumped by a hipster waif to the ground – guess I should’ve done more than skim the reviews). I mean, the first song is called ‘Prologue’ and the last song is called ‘Epilogue’. That’s not just the mark of a serious album – shit, that’s the mark of an IMPORTANT ALBUM. Primary Antler, Peter Silberman, has poured his heart out all over these songs. If you’ve ever related with any of the emotions laid bare on this record, then it’s very likely that you’ll connect with this album to the point that it will become not just a personal favorite, but an album that you’ll always be reaching for whenever life’s miseries become too much and all you need is some aural catharsis to make things a little more tolerable.
But can you fuck to it?
Well, really, you can fuck to pretty much anything (at least, I can). In hindsight, though, I probably should have picked a better album. When you’re picking music specifically for the sake of drowning out some of the sounds that are escaping underneath the door, it’s best to avoid an album that doesn’t turn up the volume until almost ten minutes in (this would be during the first chorus of the third track, ‘Sylvia’). Heck, there aren’t even any drums until halfway through the second song (the prologue was TOO IMPORTANT for drums).
This is a recurring problem with the album. The nice and loud moments are few and far between. Just when you think it’s OK to moan and groan to your heart’s content, the noise dies out. This is then followed by a seemingly-endless stretch of atmospherics before the next loud moment comes along. This pattern continues throughout the entire album. After ‘Sylvia’, you get 7 minutes of nothing, followed by the downright-jaunty ‘Bear’, then back to nothing, then the mind-blowing ‘Two’, and then it’s pretty much downhill from there.
If you and your partner are the quiet type, then it’s obviously not much of a problem. If your partner happens to be as loud as anyone you’ve ever been with, then this isn’t the album to choose. Then again, if your partner happens to be as loud as anyone you’ve ever been with, no album will effectively help keep their screams from escaping the bedroom (maybe Slayer?).
With that said, I will now humbly apologize to my roommate:
Sorry, Stuart.
So why did I pick this album for such a situation? Because the only song that I heard beforehand was ‘Two’. Since the Arcade Fire comparisons have been hot-and-heavy with this band, I was expecting more anthems, I guess (as a side note, I must say that the Arcade Fire comparison is unwarranted, as their is not one single moment in this album where everybody in the band sings at the same time). When my fair lady (who, I might add, is aware that I’m writing this) asked me to play something that I liked, ‘Two’ was the first thing that came to my mind. Shoulda gone with the P-Funk instead.
Here’s ‘Two’, by the way. You’ve heard it already.
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