3.5/5
We all know the world is crying. But it’s never been quite so clear as when caught in the throat of the weepy, towering Antony Hegarty, burdened at English-Irish birth with the androgynous hugeness of Mother Nature’s own voice, now heaving that entire pain in each moment of song: No matter where you splice it, it’s as if someone had, all at once, sounded every rung in a grand, falling forest of organ pipes.
‘Mama in the afterglow/ When the grass is green with grow/ And my tears have turned to snow,’ hollows the wheezy-beautiful she-man into album climax ‘Kiss My Name,’ finally finding enough peace in his own naturalness to step back and realize ‘mdash; too late, it would appear ‘mdash; that he and we, the rest of humanity, have officially failed the nature that composed us.
Gone are the queeny, art-folk contributors and self-conscious operahouse theatrics that beautified 2005’s sophomore I Am a Bird Now, on which its headmaster grasped at the day when all would fall into place, when he could finally osmosis out the woman inside. But the poise and fearlessness Hegarty has found in so many artistic partners ‘mdash; the combative Bjork, the defiant disco at DFA, those unashamed CocoRosie lez-dolls ‘mdash; has helped to shed years of scar tissue. On the revelatory Crying Light, Hegarty rolls around in the sheets of both deathbed and cradle, mother and father, love and solitude, accepting life in all its awkwardness and no longer bleeding for change. Meek, swishy lounge drums and an understated score of organic keys and strings (and the occasional reed) by composer Nico Muhly leave no curtain to hide behind, and still, Hegarty doesn’t overcompensate for the added spotlight to his one-woman show. Choruses are never more than monologous refrains, and themes are lolled out with such impeccable cool as to feign improvisation.
Without Hegarty’s hermit shell, the voice that always stole our breath is now almost blinding. ‘I’m gonna miss the sea/ I’m gonna miss the snow,’ he spreads across the ‘Another World’ piano with impossible softness, fully exposed to the harsh air outside his inner turmoil but finally ready to bear that greater weight.