Love can’t buy a full room, no matter what the prophets of new media might say. Even when the gushing adoration gets issued from the fast-typing manicured fingers of a name-checking rock critic, it’s not enough to ensure that there will actually be warm-drinking bodies filling the club when the band finally walks out — at least not at Iota.

The Antlers shuffled into Iota on the last languid Thursday night, dragging the sonic fruits of an inaugural album, “Hospice,” and the slow-snowball of a slew of positive reviews and early “best in 2009” lists, stretching from Pitchfork to NPR. It’s the type of trilling whisp-heavy work, managing to build and stretch droning little pop songs into eerily depressing, slow building atmospheric foothills. The dark little missive may enchant and bewitch, but make it through the ten tracks, and a very strong chance that you probably won’t be in the state of mind known as happy.

It’s an album that plays better in the headphones than the speakers — the canvasses quaver but rarely overwhelm — but on Thursday when I sat down with front man Peter Silberman, drummer Michael Lerner and keyboard stroking effects-slathering master Darby Cicci, the trio promised that the sound would be brought.

“We try to make each song as dense and expansive as we can,” said Silberman. “I don’t always know who’s making each sound or where it’s coming from, but we try to build each song as full as we can.”

DSC08374 by musicalhedonist

The back story running alongside those dense stretching songs is a powerful one, drawing a dreary theme into a powerful statement.

“Hospice came from the idea of caring for a terminal patient who’s mentally abusive to you,” says Silberman, in the press notes. “You don’t have the right to argue with them, either, because they’re the one who’s dying here; they’re the one that’s been dealt a wrong hand. So you take it, but you can only take so much.”

On Thursday, he would only stretch that out a line farther, mentioning that, “it was actually about a relationship I had at the time.”

Not the most talkative of front men.

When the band finally took the small stage inside Iota, the floor was empty, with the few people hugging the corners of the room, and the chairs of the bar. Silberman, Learner and Cicci climbed onto the stage, delayed as long as they could and finally kicked into one of “Hospice’s” standouts, Bear.

The song manages to harness a meandering little pop song to some of Silberman’s most stark and confessional lyrics.

“We’re terrified of one another/ And terrified of what that means.
But we’ll make only quick decisions/ And you’ll just keep me in the waiting room.
And all the while i’ll know we’re f-d/ And not getting unf-d soon.
When we get home we’re bigger strangers than we’ve ever been before.
You sit in front of snowy television, suitcase on the floor.”

The opening turned into a closing as the song ended in the type of swelling crashes usually reserved for thirteen-strike crescendos and second-call encores. It was a song that just kept distorting, fizzing and crashing with the cymbals, denying every applause-ending attempt. It was something different, something almost big, but unfortunately it would turn out to be one of the highest climaxes of the night.

Throughout the show, The Antlers built story after story of synth-heavy, cymbal-punctuated compositions — you never wonder what’s happening with Cicci or the keyboards— which saw Silberman’s voice draped into the middle of the noise and only allowing a few words to slip out. Then there would be the breaks when the drums would be pulled back, letting the drone of the underlying guitar melody and the lyrics of a song like “Two” to slip out in a running line of fog-draped patter about isolation, death, and a father whose selfish angry actions ensure that the psyche of his daughter will be eternally twisted.

Happy stuff.

Silberman’s stage prattle consists of a few mumbled words and quiet thanks, which plays well into his shy and sheepish, shoe-staring, effects pedal loving image. The type of self-contained world that The Antlers built works well when the room’s nearly empty, the trio seem like they would play the same way, fans or no fans, but sometimes just observing that world wasn’t enough. There were times where you wanted more of the pedals, more distortion, a loop or two, some type of consistency that could build on the swirls, and allow the band to build a greater and angrier climax. Every song built to the same middle-ground place, and while that middle ground is still higher than most bands can reach in their entire set, the delayed gratification was lovely, but ultimately unfulfilling — you just wanted something a little more.

There’s a lot to like about The Antlers, the music that rolls off of the stage is beautiful, sweeping and contains a sense of directed purpose that guides and moves the undulating waves of sound. Silberman’s voice can croon and wail on top of those waves with the best of them, and when he would throw out a line like, “there’s no saving you,” chills grab your spine.

When you’ve got the headphones, the sound grabs and wraps around your ears, and you can slip into the sliding melancholy world of The Antlers, you may never go very high, but you become accustomed to every corner and dip of the lows. There’s a comfort to the depression. When the band brings that sound live, it’s an entirely different world and sound. You could swear that you’d weren’t even hearing the same material, and while you’re never that low, somehow you just can’t quite get high enough. But for now, it’s just enough to tease you with what there might be in the future.

You’re going to hear a lot more from The Antlers in the blog-stained coming months, there’s a lot of room for growth, for development, and with a heavy touring schedule that’s highlighted by a stint of dates with all-stars of the broken hearted, Frightened Rabbit, and a spot at Pitchfork Fest, the little kids will be nodding their heads — hands firmly in pocket — and drawing the mix and match genre connections all summer long.

And that’s not a bad thing, because despite a little bit of the underwhelm, there was enough whelm (is that even a word?) to make the band worth a listen. Eventually that wall of sound will be built high and full enough that you’ll get swept into it, it’ll wash you somewhere that’s nothing like anything you’ve heard, and then we can talk again.

Oh, and for the sake of this blog and its mission, let the record show that The Antlers need more experience with D.C.

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What do The Antlers love about D.C.?

“I haven’t spent a lot of time here, the only time I’ve been here is when I play these shows,” said front man Peter Silberman.

Synth/keyboard player Darby Cicci didn’t have too much of an opinion either, but his father was moving to the area for a job, so that has to mean something.

“Getting to drive down through D.C. proper with all the monuments, I think it’s different because coming when Obama is in the White House versus before, it was kind of….. sh—y…,” said drummer Michael Lerner. “Everything was negative when Bush and Cheney were here, and now that Obama is here, it just feels positive.”

And yes, even fractured health care debates couldn’t bring that optimism down.

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There was another band on the bill, the headliners Cotton Jones, but I’m sad to say that I wimped out after about 5-6 jangly folk sing-alongs. It’s nothing against the genre. I love organs, harmonicas and female-backed harmonies with the best of them, and actually I have a special place in my heart for what Cotton Jones used to be–Page France. Some nights you can only handle so much new music, and after awhile repetitious bass lines triggered a throbbing headache and I just had to call it a night. Failure on persistence. Go check out the boys (and girl) from Maryland, they’ve got a lot of talent in their whiskey-soaked vocal chords, and you’ll walk out with a smile.

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No matter what Craig Finn may tell you about a unified scene, The Hold Steady comes at you in fragments.

Blame it on the sometimes sloppy, jangly old-school rock and roll riffs — unashamedly lifted straight from your dad’s collection of vinyl — the drunken sing-speak proclamations of Finn, or just the confusion over just what you’re watching; America’s biggest bar band throws the craziest fist-pumping house party in town.

Granted, it’d be a strange place thing to witness from the rafters, a seat, or just a spot on the balcony — boredom and misplaced analysis falls easy— but when you’re packed into the rolling, bouncing first rows of the 9:30 Club on a sloshing Sunday night, there’s no scene that I’d rather fall into.

Yes David, I know that you’ve run out of words, and DC Rock Club, you felt like Finn and D.C. seemed tired on that Sunday night, but for those people whose schedules just never found a place for the live rants of Finn and those who were willing to dance this off night seemed to be still turned on.

After a forgettable little opening act, Finn shambled out onto the stage, whispered something about feeling historic, broke into the droning 20^th century-retrospective of “Positive Jam,” for all the “sniffling little indie kids,” and then the crowd was ready to sing.

It doesn’t come every night, but from the first “Whoa oh oh’s” of “Massive Nights,” Finn competed against row after row of wide-eyed kids, ready to sweat and spit the words to every single song. In some type of strange sanctuary, Finn had the crowd confessing his words back to him in a vicious prayer that kept the kids bouncing, swaying, and pushing their way throughout the night.

There wasn’t anything mind numbingly out of the ordinary, performance wise, from The Hold Steady. The group works hard and well together, but with the exception of the always juiced Finn, they seemed a little on the low key. Tiredness, or maybe just sobriety, you can blame the beer of choice (Sol) for that one. It wasn’t like the music suffered, levels were surprisingly on, and the band rolled in a brawny and polished little bit of musicianship that saw them pulling tracks from all four albums, (even Hostile, Mass.), and highlighting the bigger side of their sound.

It was a victory lap of sorts, and even if the Hold Steady were a little tired making it around the track the crowd seemed more than ready to carry the band all the way. It’s easy when you’re being told that this is your reminder, “that we can all be something, bigger,” and you’re being sent on a hook-ridden ride that demands you to get your fists into the air.

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courtesy of ‘musicalhedonist’

The night went predictably, but no one on the floor really cared. “Your Little Hoodrat Friend,” was just as biting as you could have hoped, “Southtown Girls” turned the crowd into an echoing choir, and “Stuck Between Stations” saw the crowd sliding from one side of the room to another, in a mosh-mixed sort of sway, screaming the words in each others faces with huge grins stretching across their faces.

It wasn’t a D.C. crowd.

By the time that Finn came to “Killer Parties,” and his standard benediction, the entire crowd was ready to scream that, “there is so much joy in what we do,” and no one really cared if he had said it last night, and the night before, and the seven months before that—it’s where you were on Sunday.

The Hold Steady experience comes in against the force, of the broken heart bad spring blues, a generation groomed on cynicism, and all the frustration and anger of living in a time where job applications overflow, rent stays high, and political disbelief is just a way of life. Finn’s a storytelling prophet — confused enough to be honest, but old enough to contextualize, and in his fast shaking hands, a communal burning bush experience comes into the club.

But this story gets told too much.

Contextualizing, deifying, exaltation-dancing prose runs easy and rings shallow, but walking out of a show like the one that took place Sunday at the 9:30 Club makes you want to say something more than, “After opening with ____, the ____ showed the sold out crowd the type of neo-classical post-punk roots that have sent their latest album ___ to the front of early “best of” lists.”

You want to place the boys from Brooklyn/Minneapolis within the chapters of the greater music story, because for many of us the stories of Holly, Charlemagne and all the sad little boys and girls of America have rang far too true for the last years of our lives. Finn’s lines have been shouted through fuzzy-brained morning after morning, driving down the road after a night only remembered in cracked fragments and broken synapses, hands flapping around like some type of acid-tripping refugee, pronouncing judgments upon the car and passerby’s with ultimate truth and authority. We know they’re a little off, a little flawed, that he can’t really sing, but we don’t really care.  We know they’ve been using the same material for awhile, we know they’ve got the live routine down, but we really don’t care.We’re flawed little confused creatures, and we’ll hold onto our flawed little rock stars.

Maybe it won’t always be this way, for right now, few scenes are more fun to celebrate.

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