“Hope there’s someone to take care of me when I die,” sang Anthony Hegarty on 2005’s breakthrough I Am A Bird Now. “I need another world/ This one’s nearly gone,” he sings now on The Crying Light. These lyrics encompass the central difference between the two releases: the former, a confessional journey of personal and sexual identity, inwardly focused intended for cathartic release; the latter, Antony’s reflection on the changing world environment and his own relationship with it. This theme, especially analogized through his maternal and paternal relationships, is at the forefront of this record. Opener “Her Eyes Underneath the Ground”, whose soft piano introduces Antony’s quavering voice, deals with all these elements. Even Antony admits it; initially a song about his mother, he began feeling it was more about his mother’s relationship with her own mother, then it became about our relationship with ecology.
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Antony and the Johnsons‘ new video for the single “Epilepsy Is Dancing” from the Secretly Canadian released (as of yesterday [January 20]) The Crying Light, features — among other things — intricately crafted masks, flowers and butterflies dripping from Antony Hegarty’s lips and vibrantly painted (sometimes nude) bodies undulating on the floor.
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I’ve often compared Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons to the late Benjamin Smoke, but I don’t think I could’ve ever imagined Smoke doing a disco track like “Blind”. In fact, the song by Hercules And The Love Affair, aka Brooklyn producer Andy Butler with Antony guesting might be the only time I’ve listed a disco track as the best of anything. But it’s that good, I had to. –Derek Evers
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If you were trolling the web for tour info on Antony and the Johnsons, you might think they didn’t have any plans until the Noise Pop Festival. That is, of course, unless you did a little digging through Canadian Ticketmaster and found out that Antony Hegarty and his gang will be all over Canada and the U.S. during the month of February.
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