The Antlers and Phantogram's Cinco de Mayo Fiesta [Photo Gallery]

Despite their placement on the bill, it really seemed like Phantogram was the main event at Neumo's on Thursday. Perhaps because of their connection to local label Barsuk or because their glitchy electronics were more in the spirit of a warm up for adopted drinking holiday Cinco de Mayo, the crowds turned up early and in force. So much so that whe n I arrived an hour after doors opened, there was still more than a half hour's worth of line keeping me from the guest list and entry to the showroom. By the time that I made it inside, the band had only a couple songs worth of strobe lighting and video projections left for the wall-to-wall adoring audience. Due to poor timing and queue management, I didn't hear much, but I what I heard justified the throngs.

I suspect that competing dance parties and buckets of Corona helped to provide a little more breathing room after Phantogram left the stage and the Antlers started setting up, decorating each of their stations with small potted plants. The Brooklyn band's latest album, Hospice, is among the recent crop of of records gestated during a songwriter's self-imposed isolation. In the pseudo-autobiographical concept album Peter Silberman provides a mostly reliable, generally sympathetic narrator who has gotten himself into the unenviable problem of falling for a cancer patient. Sorrow, loss, recrimination, heartbreak, blame, and all sorts of grief and recovery ensue, all through haunting production, deeply affecting lyrics, and cheesecloth pure falsetto vocals. For all of its raw emotion and heartwrenching themes, the record is polished to bedroom obsessive standards.

Since completing his Opus, Silberman has recruited a band and taken the album on the road. Performed mostly in order, the vocal delivery is more willfully vulnerable and fragmented, with the instrumentation heavier and more aggressive to compensate while wrapping all of the tragedy in warm sonic blankets. There are walls of sound conjured from tables of electronics and organ pedals manipulated by argyle socked feet. The themes and sounds are more suitable for stoic eardrum rattled contemplation, but when "Two" rolls around in the setlist, much of the crowd hoots and breaks into shoulder swaying dancing. An encore begins, surprisingly, with a nearly unrecognizable take on The xx's "VCR" and melts into "Epilogue," the cathartic album closer.  It's the end of the set and the end of a long leg of relentless touring (they part company with Phantogram, but have a bunch of summer dates scheduled). One can hope that they find some time on the road to produce another outstanding album, albeit one that doesn't require so much personal tragedy to conjure into existence.