Antony & The Johnsons new album The Crying Light is a somber set of songs.  With such a unique vocal style, you will find an interesting sound.  The albums theme revolves around the theme of mother nature and mortality.  Antony delivers a beautiful, yet annoying album at the same time.  The music is very atmospheric and seems to be the strongest thing the album has to offer.

He seems to draw from a lot of sounds for his vocals.  Some people claim he sounds like Jeff Buckley, but he sounds more like a Tiny Tim, T. Rex, Nick Drake and Nina Simone and not as good as any of them.  If you like Nick Cave, then imagine that sound with a more lispy singer.  His vibrato sounds so flamboyant you can’t but help laugh. Ali-G would call this guy a “batty boy”. He does draw influence from his musical influence Boy George and Culture Club, but doesn’t come away with it as cheeky. It sounds like he’s trying to be serious, but that’s the same as imagining Saddam Hussein as a comedian.  Looking at this picture to the right, it looks as if he’s pretending to be a rooster (he must’ve got picked on as a child).  The album is dedicated to a dancer called Kazuo Ohno.

As terrible and annoying the vocals are, he does feature some great lyrics.  Generally of a somber tone, his lyrics from “Aeon” (or a long period of time or age) for example are :

“Aeon’s eyes forlorn
He contains the storm
He’s the pasture of my dawn”

In the single “Another World”, Antony sounds like he’s writing a farewell letter to the world and saying how he’s going to miss everything in the world such as bees, trees, snow, things that grow and the sun to name a few.  He describes his world is nearly at end, but the way it’s sung it sounds like he’s going to a different dimension like heaven.  On

“Cut me in quadrants
Leave me in the corner
Oh now its passing
Oh now Im dancing”