ANTONY & THE JOHNSONS THE CRYING LIGHT (SECRETLY CANADIAN)
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Spiritually, though, he and his idol are poles apart. Unlike George, Antony doesn’t do winking flamboyance or irony—his music is earnestly, languidly, overwhelmingly romantic. In fact it’d probably be more apt to call it Romantic, with a capital R, and his new album, The Crying Light, makes that even clearer: Antony moves away from explicit discussions of gender, instead casting himself as a poet of nature. “Daylight in my heart… daylight kisses everything she can see,” he sings on “Daylight and the Sun”; on “Another World” he proclaims, “I’m going to miss the wind, been kissing me so long.” At the beginning of “One Dove” he tenderly promises, “One dove, you’re the one I’ve been waiting for,” and then at the end, while warbling woodwinds imitate the bird’s plaintive call, he sings, “Eyes open/ Shut your eyes.” The heightened sensuality of the cabaret is opened up to encompass not just a subculture but the whole world. These are torch songs sung for the landscape.
The original Romantic poets were themselves familiar with what’s known as the pathetic fallacy. For them as for Antony, nature seemed to exhibit human characteristics and thus became implicated in human emotions. Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” imagines the poet dissolving into the nightingale’s bower in a release that’s not even all that elliptical about its sexuality. The effect is to map human relationships onto the world; romance becomes Romance as Keats suggests ecstatic union not with one female but with a transcendent feminine nature. Cabaret destabilizes and shows up the artificiality of gender by displaying idiosyncratic bodies that undermine the Platonic ideals of male and female. The Romantic project is the opposite. Male and female are solidified by unmooring them from individual exemplars; they become universal truths, not merely facts about singular bodies.
Antony’s goal on this record is appar-ently to queer the tropes with which the Romantics naturalized and universalized their own experience of maleness. He does this in part by fracturing the Romantic narrative, breaking down the lines between the poet who understands and the landscape that is apprehended. The disc starts in medias res: “Her eyes are underneath the ground,” he sings on the song of the same name, which seems to be for his mother or for her son; it’s the album’s opening cut, but self and death and earth are all already intertwined. Partway through the song Antony multitracks his voice, harmonizing with himself as perspective and identity dreamily drift apart and then back together: “With my mother and in her garden I stole a flower.” As a single voice again, he sings, “I saw six eyes glistening in my womb/ I felt you calling to me in the gloom/ Rest assured your love is pure/ Rest assured your love is pure.” He seems to be giving birth to himself, and as he splits, binaries like mother-son, nature-nurture, and male-female aren’t so much disrupted as crystallized by his oddly pristine voice. Whose love is pure? The mother’s for her son? The son’s for nature? That ambiguity never resolves itself, but the emotions that surround it vibrate with a solid clarity, like the string-bass notes that swell as the track closes.
