Antony and the Johnsons

“The Crying Light”

BIO

Antony and the Johnsons is a New York chamber-pop band headed by Antony Hegarty. Known for his peculiar warble, Hegarty’s divisive voice is equal parts masculine and femme, a vocal mirror of his transgendered past.

The band’s sophomore album, 2005′s “I Am a Bird Now,” won them a Mercury Prize and expanded its fan base.

Most recently, Hegarty’s work in the disco revivalist supergroup Hercules and Love Affair granted the artist more acclaim and mentions in many best-of-2008 lists.

REVIEW

Antony and the Johnson’s third album “The Crying Light” is a softly sung ode to the natural.

Hegarty distances himself from the experimentation of “I am a Bird Now,” where he personified New York’s avant-garde scene. Instead he chooses to embrace the otherworldly familiarity of the terrestrial.

This creates a much more accessible product as Hegarty tones down the strange for the quotidian.

His voice triumphs in a singular androgynous affect – paradoxically powerful while delicate enough that a slight touch would topple the entire enterprise.

The lyrics often are just as ambiguous as Hegarty himself. When he sings, “I cry glitter…” it is as magically fantastic as it is a nod to drag and Leigh Bowery’s mid-1980′s hysteric-glamour nightclub Taboo.

Hegarty casts himself in a studied pastoralism, masked in a pathetic fallacy as Gaia, orphic earthmother.

The near-a-capella gothica in “Dust and Water” is a pagan prayer inside St. Stephen’s Cathedral. Hegarty’s vocal acrobatics are a revelation, a glimpse of theophorous.

The only leftover from Hegarty’s preview EP is “Another World,” whose Melvillian whale-song looks to the Bark Psychosis B-side, “I Know.”

“Aeon” suggests a Nina Simone kind-of-blue over an arpeggiated lullaby, whose calm is punctuated by unsettling screams and protestations of love.

In “Daylight and the Sun,” Hegarty embraces the decadent theatrics of the black keys with a restrained accompaniment of cello and horns.

The album ambles in a slow-motion quietus that is indicative of the late Butoh performance artist Kazuo Ohno who graces the album cover.

VERDICT

Antony and the Johnson’s elegiac hymns in “The Crying Light” are bewitching, if not more transcendent than the band’s past heights in “I Am a Bird Now.”