If you've ever been to a wake, you know that death cleans up real nice - velvet casket, crisp new suit, lots of pretty flowers. It's this bizarre phenomenon, the union of darkness and beauty, that Antony takes to haunting extremes with "The Crying Light," a smiling cadaver of an album that opens with the line "Her eyes are underneath the ground" and only gets more frightening from there.
Operatic yet sparse, Antony and the Johnsons tiptoe in the same baroque pop shadows that won them the Mercury Music Prize for the 2005 album "I Am A Bird Now." The music takes its cues from a full-throated falsetto that floats cold poetry about isolation and longing, lone solaces and nature as the last retreat.
Fittingly, the title track underscores each of the record's essential elements: melancholy piano, weeping strings and a voice that could front the Three Tenors if it wasn't derived from a face straight out of "Tim Burton's Corpse Bride."
Antony gives us a song titled "Epilepsy is Dancing," which in name alone is a scary enough visual. When set to an eerily spirited piano reading, it transforms into a stately Victorian prance, awash in icy elegance and cryptic splendor. Meaning sort of comes and goes as the singer twists words with an eccentric dialect, but one refrain, through unnerving repetition, emerges unmistakable: "Cut me in quadrants. Leave me in the corner." Poe rejoices in his grave.
"Dust and Water," though, shows that lyrics have very little to do with the mood. A quiet hymn poked along by incoherent intonations, this song, like the others, is very much about feel - the feel of holding one's breath, of curling one's fingers, of awaiting one's fate. Likewise, "Daylight and the Sun" only nominally suggests a thaw as it stands out from the other theatrical piano ballads, ironically, in the depth of its chilly detachment.
The closing "Everglade" teases with the slightest hint of light, a lively flute ducking in and out of the other orchestral players. To what can we attest such fleeting warmth? Simply sparks off the funeral pyre.
