Antony and the Johnsons: The Crying Light
(Secretly Canadian)
Like a fool, I didn’t pay nearly enough attention to Antony and the
Johnsons’ 2005 album I Am a Bird Now (or, for that matter, his
self-titled debut). It was that voice. I thought it was too much, too
vampy, maybe a little too reminiscent, somehow, of David Sedaris’s
famed Billie Holiday impersonation. I was so very wrong. So thank the
gods that Hercules and Love Affair came along and snuck Antony
Hegarty’s singular singing voice into my ear via the Trojan horse of
nouveau (or nu-vogue) disco, a genre that is, to mix classical
metaphors, kind of my Achilles’ heel.
It turns out, of course, that Antony’s voice is astounding in any
setting, but much more so when given the spotlight and relatively spare
accompaniment it receives on The Crying Light. The album is dedicated
to the 102-year-old Butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno (pictured in deathly
rigorous pose on the album’s cover), who is now bedridden and unable to
speak. Ohno is a handy and poignant embodiment of The Crying Light‘s
apparent but somewhat lyrically oblique central theme of facing death,
and life, with grace.
The album matches such starkly hopeful sentiment with appropriately
subdued arrangements of piano and strings, out of which bloom, at just
the perfect moments, little bursts of uplifting melody on woodwind or
brass. But the focus throughout is Antony’s voice, whose trembling
emotional range is equaled by its sweeping tonal scale, which flies
high and wallows low, sometimes from one line to the next, with
stunning fluidity.
It’s impossible to pinpoint standouts from this cohesive and
consistently stunning album, but there are plenty of haunting moments:
Antony pleading, “mercy, mercy” on “One Dove,” the climactic key change
in the title track, the refrain “kissed by kindness” on “Daylight and
the Sun.” Though its 40 minutes pass by deceptively fast, The Crying
Light, is a compact epic, with never a breath or note wasted. 