knowncutter's Full Review: The Crying Light [PA] by Antony and the Johnsons
Antony Hegarty has the remarkably ethereal voice of an androgynous angel. With the ability to simultaneously stun and transform your emotional state, Antony's effortless vocal acrobatics make just about any piece of art he lends his voice to worth your time. For example, on the recent live release of Lou Reed's "Berlin," Antony partakes in a performance of the classic "Candy Says II." Already one of the more poignant Reed songs ever released, "Candy Says II" is, in and of itself, a timeless song. When Antony takes the steering wheel, though, "Candy Says" takes on an entirely new power. By the time Antony joins the closing refrains of "so cold," his voice is piercing through our emotional nerves like the sharpened, crystallized tips of falling icicles.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Antony and The Johnsons' latest album "The Crying Light," then, is how restrained Antony's vocals are throughout. Although his unsettlingly beautiful falsetto on album opener "Her Eyes Are Underneath the Ground" is striking in its inimitability, and although this thrilling falsetto is still the focal point of the music, is indeed the very infallible fulcrum around which everything revolves, there's no doubt that Antony is holding some of his power back. On "The Crying Light" the man with a golden dagger scathed somewhere in his lungs has largely made the decision to mesh with the surrounding music as often as he can.
The end result is a consistently beautiful record championing the advantages of laconic orchestration and diverse instrumentation. Calling the music of Antony and the Johnsons rock, or pop, or any preconceived genre is a crime. In fact, for a good portion of the record, the unpredictable and varied string arrangements bring to mind the complex, innovative brilliance of composer Igor Stravinsky. As the conclusion of "Epilepsy is Dancing" swells to the breaking point, cellos vibrate, flutes temptingly dance, and a piano riff provides the backbone for the whole song. And, of course, Antony effortlessly matches the music's burgeoning pregnancy without ever actually giving birth to the titillating release that seems so inevitable.
Given the complexity of the music at play here, it's amazing that Antony and the Johnsons are able to create the likes of "Kiss My Name," a song so instantly gratifying and resonant it leaps from the album's darker undertones like the bright glare of a found flashlight during a power outage. At the end of the song, when the circular orchestration ecstatically builds to a frenzied pace, the listener is left mouth agape in the center of a Disney forest, birds swirling and chirping in the sunlit scenery around us.
The most likely complaint registered against "The Crying Light" is just how downtrodden and uneventful the album can seem at times. Lest we forget, the light within Antony is, indeed, crying, and the shrill strings and piano can seem a little depressed here. Of course, one man's boredom is another man's poignancy, and I'd argue all the weepy minor keys on "The Crying Light" make about as elegant a melancholy as one can hope to enjoy. "Another world" crawls along at the pace of an understated, underwater piano, but I'll be damned if Antony's laments, as he pines for a dimension where he can find peace, are even close to boring.
All in all, Antony and the Johnson's "The Crying Light" is easily the most beautiful album I've heard in 2009, or for quite some time really. More importantly for the band, Antony doesn't overshadow the rest of the magnificent Johnsons as one might expect. Instead the band collaborates and cooperates to make music you can cry to and still feel a strange sense of joy. On "The Crying Light," Antony pleads for some of the simple luxuries of happiness, such as daylight and sun, and his quavering modern update of Roy Orbison always suggests a latent hopefulness. Lord knows, with the Johnsons at his side, there's no telling what Antony will be able to achieve.
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