Antony and the Johnsons - The Crying Light

Rating:

* * * *

Antony Hegarty and his chamber art-pop outfit were controversial winners of Britain's Mercury Prize in 2005 for previous and second album

I Am Bird Now

- Hegarty was born in Sussex but found his singular voice as a transgender performance artist in the New York arts underground.

His entree to the wider rock world came via Lou Reed who used him on his

The Raven

. While the acceptance of his style - his voice can suggest anything from Nina Simone to Bjork to a lonely, lovesick alien - was possibly helped by some doors being opened by the likes of Rufus Wainwright and nu-folk freaks like Devendra Banheart.

But while there's an arthouse sensibility to his approach, it hasn't stopped songs like his previous

Hope There's Someone

displaying the sort of elegant, poignant heart to make it popular funeral fare.

On first listen, there's quite a bit more pallbearer-friendly pop on this new equally haunting set of baroque ballads, right from the opening

Her Eyes Are Underneath The Ground

through to the gorgeous title track which provides a particularly heartstopping moment at the mid-point.

Elsewhere, it sounds like the

I Am Bird

-guy is growing increasingly maudlin about matters ecological with

Another World

and

Daylight in the Sun

lamenting the state of the planet, their sparse acoustic arrangements fittingly leaving very little carbon footprint.

Just occasionally he swaps more cosmic desires for more earthly ones on the soul-shaped guitar-powered

Aeon

but when Hegarty's mood takes him, as on

Dust and the Sun

, he heads into the ethereal territory last explored by the Cocteau Twins/This Mortal Coil.

Maybe this one doesn't quite have the same what-on-earth impact as

Bird

, but it's just as strange and beautiful in its own way.

Russell Baillie