Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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31 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Healing Light, 19 Jan 2009
There are very few artists alive in our crumbling world today
who are able to juggle the differences between pain and pleasure,
between hope and futility and between the intensly personal
and the fragile universal as can Antony Hegarty.
We already had a small glimpse of what was to come with the title
track of 2008's five-track realease 'Another World', included
once again as a part of this extraordinary new album 'The Crying Light'.
The ten songs performed here both consolidates familiar territory
yet also transports us into rich new emotional landscapes.
Mr Hegarty's power to break our hearts and stir our spirits with
his almost disembodied vibrato is once again centre stage.
Some of the songs bear comparison with works by early composers
such as Byrd, Dowland and Tallis. Haunted, haunting and timeless.
Title track 'The Crying Light' would not have been too out of
place heard in the court of Elizabeth The First.
An incredibly plaintive lament whose fragile harmonies and subtle
orchestration place it firmly among his finest compositions.
'Her Eyes Are Underneath The Ground' is another exquisite jewel
of a song - Julia Kent's cello accompaniment and string arrangement
are both affecting and economical.
Thoughout, the album is blessed with some of the
most able and sensitive musical support that an
artist could ever hope to have around him.
Final track (and for my money the finest song in this collection)
'Everglade' literally soars out of the speakers in transcendent,
overwhelming waves of luminous positive energy.
The project's artwork is, as ever was, both disquieting,
enigmatic and strangely moving. Stark questions left unanswered.
This is music to shine a healing as well as a crying light.
Essential.
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9 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Velvet Nightclubs, 21 Jan 2009
Antony and the Johnsons' 'I Am A Bird Now' knocked me sideways. I first heard it a few years ago at about 2 a.m. on the BBC World Service. That is about the right time of day to listen to Antony. It was clearly intensely personal, and deeply affective - it made me cry.
The e.p. 'Another World' promised much, and it revealed that the Johnsons could portray more than a solitary suffering. It started to seem that, maybe, the Johnsons were on the same sort of trajectory on which you might also find Sam, from Rick's Cafe Americain, perhaps Hoagy Carmichael from 'The Best Years Of Our Lives', and then on into Ricki Lee Jones at 'The Last Chance Texaco' with Tom Waits looking for 'Small Change'. Cocktail-sodden night clubs in the wee hours, only the drunks and the waitresses listening to the crooner slouched over his piano.
But this album adds a twist to that. We have the track 'Another World' from the e.p. but now situated in something more than the night club. Inclusion of a small chamber orchestra, clarinet, flute, tenor sax, electric guitar, very tight vocal harmonies, and some strange nearly-musical effects, take this from the night club into a slightly more surreal world; in places almost reaching a sort of Angelo Badalamenti dreamscape.
Antony's journey through a velvet nightclub world is as strange and, at times, as disturbing as any David Lynch film -
Epilepsy is dancing
She's the Christ now departing
And I'm finding my rhythm
As I twist in the snow
- giving enormous poignancy to his cry for 'Daylight and the Sun' -
There was no light
Only the white night
First born when the sun
Screamed her eyes open
Daylight in the fields
Daylight mountains
Fire kisses the floor
Of the lakes and makes shadows
This is certainly no 'Last Exit to Brooklyn. Finally, Everglade has an almost pastoral feel, oboes and strings, slipping into major keys, soft horns -
When I'm peeping in a parlour of trees
And the leaves are winking all around
"I'm home," my heart sobs in my veins
But brains they play the softest games
Fingers kiss the string
Mouth taste the blade
Of everglade
- not quite white picket fences, but as close as Antony has yet managed. ;-)
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7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Strangely strange and strangely compelling, 25 Jan 2009
And now for something completely different. I always think it is wrong when writing reviews to assume that everyone reading them is knowledgeable about that particular artist. There are still relatively few people aware of the work of Anthony Hegarty despite the originality of his 2005 Mercury Prize winner "I Am A Bird Now". It's certainly worth checking out. This is the follow up. It's difficult to describe Hegarty's voice. Probably Nina Simone is the closest in sound and that alone might give you some idea of the gender bending involved here and previously.
This is a difficult album to comment on as it's a mixture of under-stated songs about flowers and the world in general mixed with theatricality. You have to delve beyond the sparseness of some of the music and melodies. There's nothing comfortable about what Antony delivers.
On Epilepsy is Dancing he opines "cut me in quadrants, leave me in the corner." Lyrically it's an expansive album about freedom, peace, life and death. The collection of songs is dedicated to Japanese butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno. Apparently butoh is a diverse range of activities, techniques and motivations for dance inspired by Ankoku Butoh (so now you know). Thank goodness that there are people in this world prepared to push the boundaries of art and music. Antony and the Johnsons do it in a subtle and undemanding way amidst some strange instrumentation. Give this one a try. You'll either love it or hate it.
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