Anthony & the Johnsons by Tim Cook
Anthony & the Johnsons
Assuming the idea behind Antony & the Johnsons’ third album was to spread the morbid burden carried by Hope There’s Someone, then Hegarty can congratulate himself on the task achieved by Her Eyes Are Underneath the Ground and Another World. Even hardened vicars with three more “jobs” to fit in before teatime might feel their lower lips wobble when, on the latter, Hegarty trills: “I’m gonna miss the trees/ I’m gonna miss the animals”, over muted piano strains.
If The Crying Light finds Hegarty addressing our finite time on this planet, it’s with half an eye on what we’re doing to the planet in the process. With a cast of less esoterically inclined musicians, we’d be bemoaning the fact that on, say, Daylight and the Sun, the British-born New York habitué Hegarty had gone and “done a Sting”. But when he declaims, “There is no light” over a gentle baroque upswell, he sounds like a sad, old Gaia munching on downers as she watches her Wall-E DVD for the umpteenth time.
Elsewhere, Hegarty’s decision to address his phobia of guitars has yielded Aeon — an elemental declaration of devotion with more than a passing similarity to the Beatles’ Oh Darling, peaking with some arresting vocal off-roading from the singer (“Hold that man I love so much”). By contrast, his vocal restraint on Everglade and Epilepsy is Dancing somehow compounds the emotional impact of string arrangements worthy of John Barry’s more melancholy, latter-day moments.
What emerges is an album that — unlike its fêted predecessor — will be less prone to sitting on your shelf in the way that Waitrose high-end, low-calorie soup sits in your fridge (you know it’s good for you, but that Kaiser Chiefs flan looks far more fun). There’s a lingering sweetness to these songs that makes The Crying Light far more useful in life than after it.
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