Right now I'm listening to The Crying Light, the forthcoming third album for Antony & the Johnsons. Following up his remarkable second album, 2005's I Am A Bird Girl, 37-year-old Antony Hegarty has actually managed to live up to the mighty expectations that've built up for this long-awaited release.After, last time out, authoring a baroque concept-album based on a transgendered transformation from male to female —writ, in the record's language, as becoming a bird— Hegarty has made another set of thematically-bound songs wringing emotion out of, largely, piano and voice. This time, the volatile subject-matter is the notion of the Earth as a dying planet; something tipped off by the title-track of his recent EP, Another World (quote: "I need another world/this one's nearly gone").
With orchestrations by avant-gardist composer Nico Muhly (whose superlative Mothertongue set, incidentally, recently found its way onto my Top 20 Albums of 2008 list), the set is often stark: "Dust and Water" a hollowed-out lament, "Daylight and the Sun" a tear-shedding hymnal for the natural world, "Her Eyes Are Underneath the Ground" feeling as tender as an open wound.
If fans were concerned with how Antony would manage to follow up I Am a Bird Now, they need no longer be. I'm happy to announce that The Crying Light —due January 21 on Secretly Canadian— is an album rich in depth and redolent with splendor.
The Crying Light Track List
1. "Her Eyes Are Underneath the Ground"
2. "Epilepsy Is Dancing"
3. "One Dove"
4. "Kiss My Name"
5. "The Crying Light"
6. "Another World"
7. "Daylight and the Sun"
8. "Aeon"
9. "Dust and Water"
10. "Everglade"
Photo © [Don Felix Cervantes]
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