Antony & The Johnsons - 'I Am A Bird Now' (Rough Trade)
4/5
By: Toby L
Searching, plaintive, imposingly honest, Antony is a tear-jerking star in the making. That much we're certain of. Already.
You can't, after all, release an album this brave, this archly harrowing, and not be. 'I Am A Bird Now', a second opus, is as much a release for the artist as it is for its audience. An androgynous warbling, his hum-like croon is one of the most pure and engulfing we've experienced in our generation - one wrestling with the weight of the world, through the unifying tribulation we all incur through craving/attempting acceptance and trans-gender interplay; behind it all the while, a restless soul and pouring heart.
We want to hug him. So do his long list of admirers, all guesting on the release, presumably - Boy George, Lou Reed, Devendra Banhart, Rufus Wainwright. His songs are stark and Lambchop-like in their live, ambient and elegant space, managing - on occasion - to somehow occupy the same furrows as Marvin Gaye in its rending soul (as especially exhibited in highlight and brass-cacophony, 'Fistfull of Love', which collapses in a heap of overjoyed parping before being forced to a fade-out close... it's captivating).
The rest of it is pretty intoxicating, too, fortunately. 'Spiralling' is a work of enchantment - beauteous strings cascading against a lament of the title and enough to send a series of convulsions down your spine. 'Hope There's Someone', meanwhile, is a desperate, sombre bid for compatibility, one you'd have to be heartless to deny, and 'My Lady Story' is a deeply affecting avoidance of coming to terms with oneself. It gets abstract, too - the muttered-word 'Free At Last'; more a performance-piece than strictly music itself.
Bowing out on the lush, minimalist orchestration of 'Bird Gerhl', Antony is a character we'd thirty-five minutes ago been hard-pressed to understand on the surface of things. Now, he's someone we'd be foolish to ever let go.
Artists in this article: Antony & The Johnsons
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