If ever there was a voice to polarise today’s alt. pop audiences, it’s Antony Hegarty’s. His tremulous warble – which has been compared to everyone from Nina Simone and Elvis to Brian Ferry - is so fiercely distinctive (and so overtly camp) that it exasperates as many folk as it enchants.
Nonetheless, the singer has enjoyed immense success over the last few years, both with his band The Johnsons - whose debut album I Am A Bird Now took the Mercury Prize in 2005 - and more recently with NYC neo-disco aficionados Hercules & Love Affair, whose eponymous debut made good use of Hegarty’s majestic pathos. Alongside and inbetween, Hegarty has also busied himself with projects and collaborations involving pop heavyweights like Bjork, Lou Reed and Rufus Wainwright.
The Crying Light – the long-awaited sequel to I Am A Bird Now – treads similar musical territory to its predecessor: namely a gracefully restrained, sinuous stream of orchestral pop that acts as the perfect adjunct for Hegarty’s shimmering utterances. Though the music sounds familiar, the thematic focus has notably shifted away from the singer’s preoccupations with mortality, gender and sexuality towards more general meditations on death, rebirth and - most of all - Mother Nature.
The lugubrious piano-and-cello lament "Her Eyes Are Underneath the Ground" pays tribute to maternal memories with subterranean imagery (“I saw six eyes glistening in my womb / I felt you calling me in the gloom”); “One Dove,” a song about the hope of salvation arriving from ‘the other side’ drifts slowly by on ripples of elegant melancholy; “The Crying Light,” contrasts anxious, guitar-picked sorrow with unexpected finger-snaps and glistening strings that promise peaceful resolution.
As The Crying Light unfurls, it becomes clear that it’s not only about Hegarty’s personal dreams and demons, but also about his - and by extension our - relationship with the world we live in. The key song here is the simple but almost unbearably sad “Another World”. In normal hands, lines like “I’m gonna miss the birds / Singing all their songs / I’m gonna miss the wind / Kissing me so long” could be dismissed as so much doe-eyed eco- campaigning. But when Hegarty sings them – accompanied only by some poignant piano – we're somehow deeply infected by his nostalgia for a moribund planet.
The connection with Nature is further emphasized through Hegarty’s repeated elemental allusions: Water, grass, snow, ice, light, dark, sun, flowers…this primary imagery leaps from his otherwise obscure lyrics, filtered through references to ancient ideas of death-and-rebirth, creating a deeply pagan dreamscape that (deliberately) conflates pre-Christian notions with today’s environmental concerns.
Breaking up this sorrowful mood are songs like “Kiss My Name” and “Epilepsy is Dancing,” which, despite the weighty subject matter of the latter, are positively jaunty waltzes. Other surprises include the earthy “Aeon,” which surfs on some bluesy electric guitar, and the droning "Dust and Water," where Hegarty forgoes comprehensible language in favour of a verbal meditation that’s distinctly Om-like.
And Hegarty couldn't resist ending The Crying Light on a hopeful note. The sweeping “Everglade,” co-arranged with NYC's classical wunderkind Nico Muhly, is a beautiful, bucolic sigh that sounds like the lost soundtrack from a Giuseppe Tornatore score. This subtly romantic denouement seems to say: yes, the world is dying; yes, the light is crying; but maybe, through music, we can heal our rapacious selves and the planet too. It's testament to his extraordinary visionary power as an artist that we're momentarily inclined to believe it.
