The Antlers

It begins with a hypnotic drum loop leading us into a haunting guitar & the cool echoing voice of Peter Silberman. Speaking on the title track for the new album from the Antlers, Silberman states, “The song is a long contemplation of the passage of time, but with the personal events and judgments omitted. Just a description of what is.” Conceived & written almost entirely in the morning hours, Green To Gold is the band’s first new music in nearly seven years and is easily their most luminous to date.

Familiars, the fourth album from Brooklyn-based indie/chamber/electronic trio Antlers, comes as a glacially slow step in the slow-moving progress that marked both their death-themed 2009 breakthrough album Hospice and its more electronica-leaning 2011 follow-up, Burst Apart. The nine songs here are sprawling pocket symphonies, longer songs brimming over with the horn arrangements that were just hinted at on previous work, if a little lighter on airy keyboards and Boards of Canada-influenced dreaminess.

Selvaggina, Go Back into the Woods is a limited-edition live album, recorded on June 11, 2004 in Jesi, Italy. This appears to be the full set of the concert, and contains a new version of every track from previous studio effort Black Antlers. As such, the question of which has more value to the listener is to be considered. Selvaggina is well-recorded and excellently performed, and some of the kinks of the Antlers versions of the tracks have been ironed out. For example, opener "The Gimp (Sometimes)" is here a more vibrant and shorter version than its counterpart, but retains its aura of goofy menace. "Sex with Sun Ra" retains the vibe of the Antlers version, but with more urgent vocalizations from John Balance, and animated work from Tom Edwards on the marimba…

A celebration of all things noisy and extreme, featuring tracks from My Bloody Valentine, Yoko Ono, Neu!, The Fall, King Crimson, Jonny Greenwood, Sunn O))) and more!

Available only on dates of Coil's Even an Evil Fatigue tour in 2004, Black Antlers is a stopgap release that consists of early studio and live versions of songs that were being worked on for the next official studio album. Due to John Balance's accidental death, most of the tracks on Black Antlers would become final yet unpolished versions. Sounding particularly unfinished is the opener, "The Gimp (Sometimes)," a ballad that never quite comes together over its 11 minutes, failing to mesh the dark, ambient instrumentation with Balance's beautiful and haunting vocals. The second track, however, "Sex with Sun Ra (Part One: Saturnalia)" is a classic late-period Coil track. Balance intones a fictional tale of a conversation between himself and the free jazz legend over a pulsating backing track punctuated by bell tones and sparse industrial percussion…