Antony & The Johnsons – The Crying Light
For the follow-up to the Mercury-prize winning, I Am A Bird Now, Antony Hegarty and his band of not-so-merry men and women, scaled down their sound to the bare bones. Piano, strings, a smattering of drums here and there and very little else augment that tremulous, haunting voice on songs that deal with the end of the world (‘Another World’), death (‘Her Eyes Are Underneath The Ground’) and father-son relationships (the bluesy ‘Aeon’). So sparse are the arrangements, that the slightest thing can trigger the raising of a hair on the back of the neck, such as the mournful flute that appears from nowhere on ‘One Dove’ or the way everything falls away during ‘Kiss My Name’ to leave a lonely drum tattoo. By the closing ‘Everglade’, however, Antony seems to be transported to a different world, as swooning, sumptuous strings cascade around a swollen vocal. Less showy it maybe, but The Crying Light is more than equal to its predecessor.
Key track: ‘One Dove’
As 2009 lurches further towards its end, we're left to reflect on what has been a pretty good year for music. There have been some pretty amazing albums released - Animal Collective, Annie, Antony & The Johnsons (and that's just the 'A's) - but there's one album we keep returning to and that's Primary Colours by The Horrors.
Everyone's already heard all about 'the year of the second album' and the fact that Primary Colours is this massive departure into krautrock with bits of shoegaze, etc, etc. The truth is much more straight forward; the album is well good. To make it even more well good they're releasing a new single in November that was previously only available on the Japanese version of the album. This is the video for 'Whole New Way':
Yes, we mentioned the song before but it's now a bit shorter and has images and things to go with it. Lazy you say? Yes. Yes we are.
We received a very strange email this morning claiming that Beyoncé was set to release an album of maudlin covers of her own songs. The ten song set is to be called B-yond Sadness and this is the first fruit of her labour:
Very touching.
It is of course Antony & The Johnsons (it says so on the video) with their take on the pop classic. Having played it live a lot of the last few years, this studio recording is available as the b-side to recent single Aeon.
