Music Review - The Antlers - Sound and Fury - Songs From Hospice at Bowery Ballroom - NYTimes.com The Antlers" 2009 album, "Hospice" (Frenchkiss), tells a story full of grief and rage: a hospital worker grows attached to a woman dying of cancer. "I didn't believe them when they told me there was no saving you," Peter Silberman sang in "Kettering." It's an old-fashioned concept album, drifting in and out of nightmarish visions that encompass love, guilt, fear, bitterness, despair and fury. Mr. Silberman's songs risk - and rise above - melodrama on the way to a sorrowful majesty. In an enthralling concert at the Bowery Ballroom on Tuesday night, playing the songs from "Hospice" to a rapt audience, the Antlers (from Brooklyn) made clear that the music was not just a vehicle for the story. It was its own molten element, moving at its own pace. Songs emerged from, and sometimes dissolved back into, stretches of abstract sound: Mr. Silberman's guitar feedback darkening like storm clouds, Darby Cicci's hissing or whooshing keyboard sounds, Michael Lerner's atmospheric cymbals, the band's loops and layers of static and effects that only gradually led into chords and rhythms. Eventually they were topped by the words. The metamorphoses didn't stop when the melodies began. The music hovered, coalesced and surged in inexorable crescendos behind Mr. Silberman's fervent voice, an aching tenor that climbed into falsetto, shaping songs as anthems, elegies, waltzes and cries of anguish. When the lyrics were done, the songs continued, often in wordless vocal harmonies over tolling chords. The Antlers have learned considerably from Pink Floyd. Where the arrangements solidify, they often use Pink Floyd's techniques, including delayed-action drumbeats and gleaming keyboard tones that chime in while a power chord reverberates. But where Pink Floyd was stately, the Antlers are volatile. Nothing stays settled for long. Instruments suddenly drop away for lines like a doctor's pronouncement - "This thing is gonna kill you" - and later loom back up out of nowhere. It's that gorgeously plotted, ceaselessly changing orchestration that fulfills the Antlers" songs. Anything less rhapsodic might easily turn into bombast. Mr. Silberman's voice, with its tearful quaver and upward leaps, could start to sound hammy, and the tunes would reveal their clear-cut pop structures. But the Antlers never let that happen. Their music plunges the songs into an emotional maelstrom, never resolving itself too simply. The band could sound open, hollow and desolate, or swirling with mixed feelings, or something like heroic. "Wake" evolved from a lament to something like redemption as Mr. Silberman sang, "Some patients can't be saved but that burden's not on you/ Don't ever tell anyone you deserve that." With "Hospice," Mr. Silberman found a story that, for all its sadness, was rich with possibilities. His music gives him the means to tell many others.