Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
More Small Steps On The Way To Somewhere, 12 Oct 2008
This precious gem of an EP quite took me by surprise.
Apparently a stepping stone along the way to new album
'The Crying Light' due for release sometime next year.
2005's Mercury Prize winning collection 'I Am A Bird Now'
tore our nerves to shreds with its' raw revelatory exposure.
'Another World' plunges us once again into strange and
turbulent emotional territory.
Opening track 'Another World' is every bit as beautiful
as his masterpiece 'Hope There's Someone'.
Spare and bare and disturbing in its' stark simplicity.
'Crackagen' has a fragile, jewel-like melody, carried
sublimely by the gorgeous piano and string accompaniment.
'Shake The Devil' (like the artwork) is the stuff of nightmares.
The childlike rhyme concealing a dark and terrifying heart.
From its' quiet ambiguous opening to the raucous bluesy
ending this is a very fine song indeed.
The halting progress of 'Sing For Me' belies another fine
composition which manages both to bewilder and beguile.
Final track 'Hope Mountain', with its' elusive folk-like
melody, minimalist piano and brass arrangement and half-heard
whisperings concludes this extraordinary recording.
Far to the left of the middle of the road and all the more
wonderful because of it, Mr Hegarty and his otherworldly voice takes
a few more tentative steps towards some form of rare tranforming light.
The Wolf is willing to follow.
Highly recommended.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Bewilderingly beautiful, 25 Nov 2008
You may remember Antony And The Johnsons from their surprising Mercury win in 2005 for the haunting and utterly unusual 'I Am A Bird Now', which featured a voice and sound as unconventional as frontman Antony Hegarty's appearance itself. Well, it's three years on and Hegarty and his band return with the five track EP 'Another World' - a somewhat disengenuous title considering it's not really a departure from their last album.
Opening track 'Another World', with its sparse, piano-based backing, serves as a reintroduction to Hegarty's tremulous and androgynous vocals, and the sense of desolation recalls in some part the heartbreaking and unsettling beauty of 'Hope There's Someone'. 'Crackagen' manages to be slightly more uplifting and is classically skewed, with a delicate piano melody accompanied by a lush strings arrangement and purring vocals. It is Hegarty's voice as ever though, that garners the most attention and touches on all kinds of contraries, suspended somewhere between male and female, alluring and offputting, comforting and disturbing (epitomised by the gender-bending EP artwork, featuring Kazuo Ohno, a Japanese butoh dancer). Though conjecturing that he's a latter-day reincarnation Billie Holiday would be an adequate comparison.
'Shake That Devil' shakes things up - excuse the pun - with a quiet, ambivalent beginning and Hegarty almost voodoo chanting "shake that dog right out of me, that dog, that dog... that dog had its way with me", with the merest hint of malevolence in his voice. Just as it builds to sinister levels of discomfort, it transitions into a darkly upbeat mix of gospel, blues and jazz complete with saxophone squeals and a handclap style of percussion. But after this change of pace it's a return to the piano on 'Sing For Me', a brief song that stops and starts constantly and doesn't progress naturally as a result. Last track 'Hope Mountain' has a poignant, fragile melody of beautiful melancholia, interrupted by a gentle blast of brass every now and then that lifts it momentarily before it descends back into languor again.
'Another World' is definitely an acquired taste. The almost impenetrable, locked-in emotional interiority makes the record inaccessible and even if you can get inside the musical universe of Antony And The Johnsons, it's an oppressive atmosphere and the urge to escape becomes paramount. For all its strangeness though, it is bewilderingly beautiful.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
when your ears have had enough of songs like 'oh my gosssh!', 31 Oct 2008
there comes an ep, this ep. i love it. i can't think of a more beautiful cd cover than this one, with a picture of legendary theatrical butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno. the tracks themselves are strange, as another reviewer put it, but i think they're more confident and complex than the ones on 'i am a bird now'. there's less tremor in the voice, maybe, but this underplaying is gorgeous, coy and intriguing. it is also a more experimental set of songs, not requiring the lush gorgeous emotional heavyweight tunes of 'hope there's someone' and 'fistful of love', instead, and from way off the park so that i for one couyldn't see it in my rearview OR my side mirrors, comes a song like 'shake that devil' which sounds like a folk song, a voodoo chant, free jazz and blues all tightly packed, rolled up and smoked in a ny club. love this ep.
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