Perversely, the main drawback of the third album by everyone’s favourite Nina-Simone-voiced-Giant-Haystacks-sized-Sonya-Jackson-look-alike Antony Hegarty is that it’s exactly the album he wanted to make, and achieves precisely what it sets out to do. Amongst all the hoo-ha and accusations that surrounded Antony’s 2005 Mercury Music Prize victory, it’s often forgotten what an absolutely astounding record I Am a Bird Now was, and is, an utterly jarring yet entirely bewitching set of psychosexual baroque pop that should have plenty to say when people start thinking about the best albums of the last decade (‘the noughties’ if you prefer, or ‘the proppa nawties’ if you’re Danny Dyer). It also exposed Antony Hegarty to something dangerously close to fame- not quite Madonna levels of hysteria admittedly, but the kind of fame that prompts Richard Littlejohn to mention you in his Mail column while using the phrases ‘Give me Rod Stewart any day of the week’ and inevitably ‘You couldn’t make it up’- which goes some way to explain the near four year gap between the two albums. In response to the critical and commercial success of that album, for The Crying Light Antony has decided to reign in pretty much all of the flamboyance and drama that used to be pretty much his trademarks- gone are the operatic codas, the wailing torch songs and all the camp and circumstance that defined his greatest work, and as a result the album is so shockingly restrained and slight that in places it barely exists. It’s also wilfully uncommercial, with the great majority of the album made up of just Antony and a piano, with perhaps the tiniest hint of an orchestra, singing melodies so subtle you have to locate them with a magnifying glass. There’s a moment near the end of ‘Aeon’ where Antony suddenly calls out in that astonishingly beautiful voice of his ‘Oh that man I love SO MUCH!’ which honestly couldn’t be more shocking if he confessed to murdering Jill Dando while doing an impression of Louis Walsh, and it takes you a while to realise that it’s because it’s the only point in the album’s entire 40 minutes that the singer lets himself go for even just a millisecond- the rest of the album is repressed, studied and almost psychopathically restrained.
It’s also frequently brilliant and heartbreakingly beautiful (unsurprisingly, as Antony next album could be a track-by-track Oompah Band re-imagining of Aqua’s Aquarium album and he still couldn’t help himself making it exquisite enough to make even Fabio Capello weep), and so far ahead of any of his contemporaries that it’s almost embarrassing. Tracks like ‘Another World’, ‘Her Eyes are Underneath the Ground’ and the title track are so beautifully precious and ornate that you worry they’ll simply shatter if you talked over them. If the record does nothing else it provides further evidence of Antony Hegarty’s title of possibly the most singular and unique musical talent of his generation, even if I wish that his next record didn’t jettison quite so many of the things that made him so special in the first place.
It’s also frequently brilliant and heartbreakingly beautiful (unsurprisingly, as Antony next album could be a track-by-track Oompah Band re-imagining of Aqua’s Aquarium album and he still couldn’t help himself making it exquisite enough to make even Fabio Capello weep), and so far ahead of any of his contemporaries that it’s almost embarrassing. Tracks like ‘Another World’, ‘Her Eyes are Underneath the Ground’ and the title track are so beautifully precious and ornate that you worry they’ll simply shatter if you talked over them. If the record does nothing else it provides further evidence of Antony Hegarty’s title of possibly the most singular and unique musical talent of his generation, even if I wish that his next record didn’t jettison quite so many of the things that made him so special in the first place.
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