“No guru, no method, no teacher/ Just you and I and nature, in the garden,” Van Morrison sang more than 20 years ago. That line could be the epigraph for Antony & the Johnsons’ third album proper, a collection of slow airs that sometimes revel in the natural mystic, but just as often lament the possibility of its extinction.
The indisposed might consider this prospect about as much fun as shingles, but The Crying Light is no hello birds/goodbye trees indulgence. In its still and stately way, it’s a very hardcore album.
Songs like ‘Her Eyes Are Underneath the Ground’ are composed of surrealistic words crooned against backdrops of piano, cello and oboe-arrangements as skeletal and compelling as trees in winter. Gone are the theatrical flourishes of earlier albums, leaving desolate beauties like ‘Daylight and the Sun’ and ‘Another World’, songs that, in their reconciliation of humanism and devastation, evoke nothing so much as McCarthy’s The Road.
But there are lovely melodies throughout, and despite the many poetic couplets that draw blood, songs like ‘Everglade’, ‘Kiss My Name’ and ‘Epilepsy Is Dancing’ (“Cut me in quarters/ Leave me in the corner”) could’ve been composed for the Victorian drawing room. Elsewhere, the devotional sentiment expressed in ‘One Dove’ belies Arcadian folk underscorings. There are few enough showy moments – only the majestic ‘Aeon’ strives for the soul testimonials of ‘Fistful Of Love’ or ‘If It Be Your Will’ – but The Crying Light is a piece of work on a par with John Cale at his most severe and austere.
Antony Hegarty’s got something to tell us about the human condition. It’s not his fault if it ain’t warm and fuzzy.

Key Track: ‘Aeon’