Album Review

It’s hard to find too much fault with The Crying Light as long as the amazing voice of Antony Hegarty is front and center. On the follow-up to 2005’s critically-lauded I Am A Bird Now, the musical accompaniment is akin to apparitions floating behind Antony: quiet piano here, sighing horns there, insinuating strings most prevalent of all without ever coming to the forefront.

Antony has the spotlight, and rightly so. His voice flutters like eyelids in REM stage, alternately soaring with avian freedom and crashing into bottomless despair. If you’re hearing it for the first time, it may be startling. But stick with it and The Crying Light will reward you with moments of unmistakable beauty you won’t find very often on any scene.

Notice that I didn’t specify what scene, because trying to categorize this music is a fruitless endeavor. Most of the songs could be loosely grouped together as lush torch songs. Rhythm is mostly absent, unless you count the gentle sway that the receding instrumentation occasionally induces. You’re left with that unique vocal instrument taking charge of melodies that can rise out of melancholy into surging emotion in a heartbeat, as on “Daylight and the Sun,” which features an ambitious structure but really only explodes when Hegarty sinks his teeth back into the main melody.

Listen to “Daylight and the Sun”

On the rare occasions when the music awakes from its slumber, Antony is ready for it, making you wish that he’d try it more often. Case in point is “Kiss My Name,” which features a much fuller musical backdrop and a kicky drum beat. The frontman responds with one of his nimblest set of lyrics and an appropriately rousing vocal. “Aeon” is a marvel as well, riding a 50’s-style guitar riff and a booming singing performance.

Listen to “Kiss My Name”
Listen to “Aeon”

But those are the exceptions amidst the downbeat rule. And all those sad songs tend to run together a bit. The ones that linger in the memory are the ones with the most memorably moving tunes, like the pretty album-opener “Her Eyes Are Underneath The Ground,” or the ones that feature Antony at his most powerfully emotional, like the gospel-tinged “Another World” and the singer’s haunting refrain of “I need another world/This one’s nearly gone.”

Listen to “Her Eyes Are Underneath the Ground”
Listen to “Another World”

Lyrics like that one are typical, deftly combining concern for Mother Earth with Hegarty’s personal themes of loss and redemption. And while individual lines hit home now and again, rarely do the lyrics cohere and even rarer do they rise to the bar set by his vocals. All that means that The Crying Light can leave you absolutely awestruck from time to time and yet still wanting a little more when it’s all done.

That said, it’s still a treat to hear the purity and uniqueness of Antony’s voice in a large, album-size chunk after a relatively long hiatus. Just listen to the way he caresses the word “mercy” on “One Dove.” He makes it sound like you’ve never heard the word properly before, yet makes you truly understand its meaning for the first time. The Crying Light may just be a series of moments, but what truly gorgeous moments they are.

Listen to “One Dove”

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