“Epilepsy is Dancing”
from the album The Crying Light
2009
iTunes

Antony Hegarty is one of the most unusual and compelling singers in popular music, though “popular” is something of a misnomer — his namesake band, Antony and the Johnsons, is beloved in indie music circles and not widely known outside them.

Yet if you’re not singing jazz or opera, you’re a pop singer by default. Hegarty is a pop singer, then, with a voice that flutters and trembles on baroque, semi-orchestral songs. They are not aimed at a mass-market audience. They are beautiful, vulnerable and haunting.

His breakthrough second album, 2005’s I Am a Bird Now, broke through in that it earned considerable critical acclaim (including England’s Mercury Prize) and featured contributions from two of Hegarty’s biggest influences: Boy George and Lou Reed.

If that seems like an odd pairing, it’s also an appropriate one. Hegarty’s music blends Reed’s unflinching honesty and Boy George’s wistful whimsy for a sound that is aching and brave, as much so on his latest as on his earlier work.

The Crying Light, the transgendered singer’s third full-length album, is a collection of songs reflecting on the natural world. Some of Hegarty’s musings are literal: He bids sad, gentle farewell to a war-torn and ecologically damaged planet on “Another World,” ghostly piano chords floating alongside his sorrowful voice.

Elsewhere, Hegarty speaks metaphorically, low strings moaning behind him as he imagines earth as mother on “Her Eyes Are Underneath the Ground.” Sometimes it’s a combination, and he turns the absence of actual light on “Daylight and the Sun” into a call for enlightenment, his voice expanding as strings and piano build toward a crashing climax.

Hegarty wrote and helped to arrange all the songs on The Crying Light, and his writing bears the same sensitivity as his singing on what amounts to a spellbinding album.

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Founded in Madison, WI in 2005, Jonk Music is a daily source for new music.