For his second post-hiatus release, the Antlers’ Peter Silberman takes on the cult of misinformation with Blight, an experiential, evidence-based song cycle on the climate crisis and related eco-devastation wrought by our ravenous consumer culture. Mirroring the waning pulse of the natural world, Blight’s subtle shifts between the delicate and the dramatic, the organic and the synthetic, bring to mind the quieter moments on Grandaddy’s The Sophtware Slump, another well-timed commentary on the dehumanizing price of progress. And while the themes are heavy, the album’s tasteful fusion of piano balladry and pulsing electronic textures lightens the load somewhat.
Blight was recorded over a few years, mostly at Silberman’s home studio in New York’s Hudson Valley. Its location adjacent to an expanse of freshly chopped hayfields afforded the perfect stripped-back environment for the walks that fueled much of the writing on the album. “I felt like I was wandering around an abandoned planet,” says Silberman, who offers more insights below.
—Hobart Rowland
1) “Consider The Source”
“A song of many questions, a window into my thought process as I consider the impact of such ordinary, everyday choices as a person buying things and disposing of them. The opening line is key to everything that comes after it, both in this song and those that follow: ‘I don’t think about what I can’t see.’ This song is about beginning to see.”
2) “Pour”
“This one tells the story of a chemical spill that went unnoticed for a very long time, eventually reaching a neighborhood downhill and contaminating the drinking water, making the residents ill. The song emulates the effect of time passing and toxins accumulating. It’s a microcosmic example of the macrocosmic problems ahead.”
3) “Carnage”
“Another one about heightened awareness, through scenes describing the animals who got in the way of people. Their deaths weren’t malicious—they were inconvenient. It’s easy to write these off. But once I allowed myself to face them, I couldn’t look away.”
4) “Blight”
“I think it’s easy to criticize online shopping habits and the environmental/human costs of conveniences like overnight shipping. I was more interested in connecting with my own psychological experience around these tendencies—the impatience to get something right away and the sheer willpower required to resist that urge. Those powerful people who created these conditions are tapping into something deep and dark within us—the kind of insatiable hunger we associate with invasive insect swarms.”
5) “Something In The Air”
“Here our choices catch up with us, but it’s unclear which ones. Suffice it to say that present conditions are primed for horrific outcomes—and despite warnings, we don’t always see them coming. Maybe this is about that moment when disaster strikes, or perhaps just about the paralyzing fear that it’s imminent.”
6) “Deactivate”
“An imagination of near end times. It might not be so long before some technology offers the possibility of an escape hatch. Hard to say what form that could take, but this song conceives of it as disembodied consciousness and the promise of immortality. This may sound appealing, and surely the sales pitch will be enticing. But we should beware the dangers of entrusting our minds to those out for profit—or, worse, an artificial intelligence that might have goals at odds with our survival.”
7) “Calamity”
“Just a very honest song questioning what we’ll leave behind in the wake of rampant consumption and immense waste. These feel like insurmountable problems, too vast in scale to solve. But I hope confronting the reality and details of our impact could keep these issues top of mind, instead of relegating them to hidden corners.”
8) “A Great Flood”
“A simple, somewhat biblical song about the moral questions surrounding environmental neglect—and loftier considerations of whether some force in the universe is keeping record of our impact. What is the effect on our souls?”
9) “They Lost All Of Us”
“And here’s what it might sound like—a world without people but indelibly haunted by us … rockets leaving a windy and burning landscape.”
See the Antlers live.
