When an album doesn\u2019t live up to the massive hype surrounding it, it somehow becomes even more of a disappointment.\u00a0 All the pieces are here on this disc, the latest from indie darlings Antony & The Johnsons: Antony Hegarty\u2019s magnificent, crystal-pure vocals, ominously stark lyrics, and taut instrumentation. But the overall effect of Swanlights, <\/i>their follow-up to the critically-acclaimed masterpiece The Crying Light, <\/i>is extremely inaccessible and at times utterly morose with not as much payoff as this listener would like. <\/p>\n
Swanlights <\/i>is definitely not an album you can listen to once and feel at home with. The opening track, \u201cEverything Is New,\u201d is stilted and choppy, but when you listen to it multiple times, you realize that that\u2019s precisely what they were after, so that when the track finally coalesces into its orchestral conclusion, all swelling keys and Hegarty\u2019s rafter-reaching vocals, it\u2019s something beautiful and wholly different from what the song was. Antony & The Johnsons is clearly focused on overall effects and aesthetics, and each song is like a miniature world.<\/p>\n
The problem with that, though, is that there\u2019s no real cohesiveness to Swanlights, <\/i>and no outstanding songs like The Crying Light. <\/i>Each cut has its own strengths, but as an album, it flounders. Hegarty often sounds uncertain, less the powerhouse that he\u2019s come to be known as. The most succinct way to describe this disc is esoteric. It really does resist interpretation in a lot of ways, and those that appreciated the group\u2019s earlier efforts may balk at the cracked vocals of \u201cThe Great White Ocean\u201d or the abstractness of \u201cFletta,\u201d which finds Hegarty pairing up with Bjork. Their voices pair beautifully together, but it\u2019s hard to tell what that beauty actually amounts to. Overall, Swanlights <\/i>might have benefited greatly from a few more accessible tunes thrown in \u2013 no less aesthetically pleasing, but something that might have allowed the listener to connect with Hegarty more and to feel more grounded in his gorgeously amorphous world. <\/p>\n
Perhaps the closest thing to that is \u201cThank You For Your Love,\u201d recently released as the first single off the disc. It\u2019s simple and subdued, quietly anchored by drumbeats as the song launches out but soon it\u2019s a fanfare of saxophone. It\u2019s somewhat reminiscent of \u201cThank You\u201d by Led Zeppelin, and the burst of actual energy is a welcome change from the minimal, even at times plodding, pace of the rest of the album. Plus, the sheer ebullience of Hegarty\u2019s voice on lines like \u201cNow there\u2019s a reason to wake up each day \/ A reason to shake my blues away \/ Now I am whole, a lucky soul\u201d makes the whole song a joy to listen to.<\/p>\n
Still, there are moments when the group\u2019s experimentation and willingness to reinvent themselves hits home. The title track, \u201cSwanlights,\u201d is six minutes of moody, yearning loveliness, proving that when you give Antony & The Johnsons time to grow and prove themselves, they are as amazing as their reputation would portend. Warping his voice through distortion, Hegarty creates a track that is subtle and blackly brilliant.<\/p>\n
Overall, Swanlights <\/i>is an album that gets richer with each listen, although it is definitely not the peak of what Antony & The Johnsons can do with their talent. Still, this disc proves that they are as artistically inspired as always, and it will be interesting to see in which direction they head next.\u00a0 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":48,"featured_media":30662,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[8353],"rating":[5612],"class_list":["post-42333","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-antony-and-the-johnsons","rating-rating-b-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/42333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/48"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42333"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/42333\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=42333"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=42333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}