KTRU review-in-brief: The Crying Light

By Rose Cahalan     1/22/09 6:00pm

Every week at KTRU, eager DJs scribble out short reviews of music's cutting-edge albums. KTRU's Music Department uses these reviews to judge the quality of the albums it receives and to provide information for the DJs who play them. Each week, a DJ polishes one of these reviews so that KTRU's riches can shine for the larger Rice community.Where has singer-songwriter Antony Hegarty been since rocketing to indie stardom with 2005's I Am a Bird Now, an almost completely unknown record that beat out big names like Coldplay and Bloc Party to win the United Kingdom's prestigious Mercury Prize? One answer comes in a song title from his new release The Crying Light: "Another World." This album sounds as ghostly and distant as an alien transmission - but its emotional register feels entirely human.

Hegarty, the singular force behind Antony & The Johnsons, is himself a study in contrast: Despite a towering physical presence, he has a nimble, octave-hopping voice that has evoked comparisons to soul goddess Nina Simone. Perhaps the only transgender musician to gain a relatively mainstream following, he focused on finding an authentic self while rejecting the conventional gender binary in his last album, with such lyrics as "One day I'll grow up, I'll be a beautiful woman, / but for today I am a boy."

Now his thematic focus has shifted from questions of the body to those of the earth, with landscape imagery recurrent in The Crying Light. The first track, "Her Eyes are Underneath the Ground," sets the album's prevailing tone of loss and rebirth by putting a modern spin on the Persephone myth. "Another World," which envisions a wistful goodbye to a barren planet, would have fit well on the soundtrack of Wall-E: "I'm gonna miss the birds, singing all their songs / I'm gonna miss the wind, been kissing me so long," croons Antony wistfully. Chamber arrangements by avant-classical composer Nico Muhly augment the vocals with lush touches of strings and woodwinds while managing not to smother them. Instead, each mirrors the other, as in the title track when violin vibrato and Antony's trembling voice seem for a moment to meld into one otherworldly instrument.

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If all of this makes the album sound a bit sentimental, that's because it is. Antony's style is unashamedly dripping with emotion, and at 59 meandering minutes, The Crying Light requires patience.

But his voice alone may be enough to keep listeners mesmerized. Antony synthesizes male and female qualities to sing with equal measures of power and vulnerability, and the result is something with which everyone can identify. He displays marvelous range in "Shake That Devil," a mournful ballad that grows into a bluesy breakdown, and again in the propulsive, electric-guitar fueled "Aeon," in which he sings soprano, growls and shouts, all in under five minutes and without ever seeming insincere. While few performers today possess such chameleon-like versatility, fewer still can channel so many traits while remaining genuine - and that makes Antony a rare bird.

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