It's not always a criticism to say that you don't want to listen to a certain album. Some music requires an investment you're just not willing to make at all times. Sometimes you want strong rhythms and supple hooks to just nod your head along to. And it's not likely that you're always in the mood to submit your heart to music that's guaranteed to make you feel lonely, sad and helpless. Such is The Crying Light, an album of such naked honesty and emotional resonance that it should never appear on the playlist of anyone with a prescription to antidepressants. Antony Hegarty doesn't seek to bring you down, mind you. But in telling the truth of his interests and experience, you'd have to be made of stone to not mentally curl up into a fetal position before the last delicate note escapes the speakers.
Hegarty kept busy last year with his group's Another World EP and a handful of vocal appearances on Hercules and Love Affair's self-titled album (the single, “Blind,” appeared high on my list of 2008's best songs). If by some slender chance your first experience with Hegarty is “Blind,” do not enter into the arms of The Crying Light with the same expectations. That tremulous voice is easily recognized (sadder, more fragile, but still wavering with all of the soul's vulnerabilities) but you won't want to boogie down to this record. Antony & the Johnsons is a band that requires cozy comforts for reflection—if he ever appears in an arena-sized venue (not likely), you might as well not even show up if you're back more than ten rows. And now that he's finally delivered the follow-up full-length to 2005's I Am a Bird Now, an opportunity to see him perform may soon come your way (he already did several shows before the album's release).
Although Crying Light makes for a relatively diffusive companion to Bird, that's no reason to dismiss one out of hand. Comparatively, Bird seemed like a warm-up to his center stage performance. Guest stars like Rufus Wainwright, Lou Reed and Boy George floated through the record with so little attention-calling that it became easy to wonder about Hegarty's relationship with that proverbial spotlight. Early on, there was speculation (and subtle admissions) that he wasn't entirely comfortable in his own skin. With so much focus on his memorable guests, Hegarty was able to take small steps out onto the enclosed space of the almost claustrophobically intimate environment he has built for himself. While there is no doubt that Antony & the Johnson's music is rich and evocative, it's so quietly subsistent that Hegarty's vocal tremble may come off as uncomfortable and ill-prepared to anyone not properly listening. Those who suspect he lacks the chops to command, though, need only hear the contents of his mind and heart to feel the graze of pain arriving on each breath.
Which brings me back to my previous admission that this is not going to be an easy listen to absorb. If you're looking for a good time (and we all do to various degrees), skip this one until you find yourself in a comfortably contemplative state of mind. The music doesn't gallop towards you with momentous anxiety; it haunts as delicate as the voice that perches above all. The strings have no room for syrup when they're as dusky and razor thin as these. The woodwinds offer no grand fanfare but instead pretend that the funereal sessions truly are mourning a man's loss. And the famed piano aches beneath casual fingertips while those hammers hit so calmly that they seem more afterthought than musical fulcrum. Excepting the fluttering finale of “Kiss My Name,” the first truly notable tonal increase doesn't arrive until the seventh track, and even that is short-lived. The central two minutes of that song only sound lively because of the foreboding melancholy that anticipated it; immediately after, it returns to the cellar with morose strokes and sighs.
But Crying Light's impact comes mostly from Hegarty's wounded words, the baring of a speculative man stuck in the eternal questions that bridge the great gulf of the human experience. Even the triumphs are of understated sadness, as exemplified on “Aeon”: “Oh, his heart enjoyed/Restores eyes alloyed/Carry me through the olden void...Aeon’s eyes forlorn/He contains the storm/He’s the pasture of my dawn.” And as the celebration evaporates into sorrow, the knowledge of futility's approach wraps us up in its poetic yet straightforward spell; “Hold my father/For it is myself/Without him I wouldn’t exist...Hold that man/In your tender clutch/Hold that man I love so much.”
“Another World” (a transfer from last year's EP) is less personal but expresses itself in ways both simplistic and explicit. “I'm gonna miss the sea/I'm gonna miss the snow/I'm gonna miss the bees/I miss the things that grow.” Initially, it seems to be a suicide note coda, but I estimate it revolves around the agony of Mother Earth. On “Her Eyes Are Underneath the Ground,” his unbreakable sorrow is almost interrupted by the angry surge that turns against the very heart that bleeds in cause. “No one knows why she did the things she done/Ocean, swallow me now.” Even then, he keeps up the trilling falsetto; fangs never bare themselves here.
Hegarty's grasp of this sparse but ultra-dramatic tendency could not have been an easy feat. Upon mere glance, everything from the music to the vocals and the lyrics read like pretentious and drippy melodrama. It requires a first-person experience with all elements coalescing in your ears to understand how well he establishes and commits to the heart-on-sleeve performance. Finale “Everglade,” one of the most stirring musical numbers, contains sentence fragments that beg an eye roll. But when you hear him warble about “peeping in a parlour of trees,” the sun playing “crystal with my eyes,” and finally, “Fingers kiss the string/Mouth taste the blade/Of everglade,” it's impossible not to be moved by a profound faith in his honest intentions. I may play this album less than all other great records this year, but when I find myself in tune with his sad but affecting world, I know I'll always emerge on the other side moved.
"The Crying Light" is on sale January 20, 2009 from Secretly Canadian.
