Antony And The Johnsons - Swanlights (2010) {Rough Trade}
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© 2010 Rough Trade | RTRADCD573
Rock / Chamber Pop / Alternative Pop / Art Rock
Swanlights,
the fourth full-length by Antony and the Johnsons, reveals that 2009's
The Crying Light was a stepping stone that furthered his sophistication
as a songwriter, arranger, and singer. While that album's tunes about
acceptance, death, transformation, and loss were added to immeasurably
by Nico Muhly's gorgeous string arrangements, Swanlights employs the
same band, this time augmented by a chamber orchestra. Antony Hegarty
uses his voice on this set as much as a textural element in his songs as
he does to deliver his poetic, and sometimes head-scratchingly obtuse
lyrics, like "Elect the salt mother, for she is a selective Christ."
These songs engage with popular genres from folk-rock to grand classical
chamber orchestral, but they do touch on vanguard art song as well.
Their themes
often comment on the natural world -- a huge part of Hegarty's moral
conscience -- but lyrically, this is a more difficult album to pin down.
Album-opener "Everything Is New" features one of his standard tropes:
using a repetitive piano line and his voice to play upon the title in
various ways, breaking the words up in various combinations and cadences
to create a mantra-like effect before bringing in the band, in a
near-modal exploration, to hang his lyrics on. "The Great White Ocean"
follows it, still using that theme, before becoming its own lovely,
near-nursery rhyme; it sounds like a prayer adorned by acoustic guitars,
Julia Kent's cello and Hegarty's vocal softly moan between and after
the verses. "I’m in Love" feels a bit like Steve Reich scoring an
early-'60s Doc Pomus song, with winds, strings, upright bass, drums, and
piano all melding in a near-fingerpopping, soulful anthem to romance.
"The Spirit Was Gone" is a haunting meditation on death, with Hegarty
accompanied by Kent and a small orchestra, but it's countered by the
nearly shimmering pop of "Thank You for Your Love." The strangeness of
"Fletta," an Icelandic duet with Björk, is in a genre all its own and
departs markedly from the rest of the album's contents. The voices are
accompanied only by Hegarty's piano. The sparse phrasing is nonetheless
insistent; its melody walking the margins of folk and classical
minimalism: if the latter was heard by Kurt Weill. Classical aspirations
continue on "Salt Silver Oxygen," but these songs as a whole suggest
the place where Van Dyke Parks might be entertained by the spring-like
harmonies of Vaughan Williams' songs. Ultimately, in mood, ambition, and
execution, Swanlights is a testament to Hegarty's increasingly
iconoclastic -- yet gorgeously accessible -- brand of art pop. |
tracklist:
01. Everything Is New
02. The Great White Ocean
03. Ghost
04. I’m In Love
05. Violetta
06. Swanlights
07. The Spirit Was Gone
98. Thank You For Your Love
99. Fletta
10. Salt Silver Oxygen
11. Christina’s Farm
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ReplyDeleteThere is no file. What hapen with the music in this blog? all the cd's are great, but then ther's nothing. Please, hung it on again.
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