Antony and The Johnsons’ Swanlights follows hot on the heels of last year’s The Crying Light, and finds Antony Hegarty and his group once more getting their atmospheric, chamber-pop groove on. To be fair, since their breakthrough album, 2005’s wonderful, Mercury nominated I Am A Bird Now, the band have continued to grow creatively, and they have added some intriguing new elements to their sound this time around.
For sure, there are the regulation piano ballads in the shape of ‘Everything Is New’ (which shares its name with a track from last year’s Jack Penate album – what is it with bands coming up with the same song titles all of a sudden?) and ‘Christina’s Farm’, but elsewhere, Antony is pushing out into new territory. There is the Brechtian/Waitsian vibe of ‘I’m In Love’, the theatrical flourishes of ‘Ghost’ and the orchestral manoeuvres in the dark of ‘Salt Silver Oxygen’, which sounds like a cut from a classic movie soundtrack.
Perhaps best of all is the title track, which opens with a sample played backwards, then morphs into an unsettling sounds cape, with Hegarty’s spectral croon floating over shards of ambient guitar noise. Reminiscent of the thrillingly experimental material on Scott Walker’s latter-day masterworks Tilt and The Drift, it is absolutely superb.
There is also an impressive duet with Bjork on the delicate ‘Fletta’ but to be honest, I found the album’s uniformly hushed tone to be a little one-paced – a couple of up-tempo tracks in the vain of Hegarty’s excellent Hercules And Love Affair collaboration, ‘Blind’, wouldn’t have gone amiss.
Still, devotees should have precious little to complain about.