Antony and the Johnsons
Another World

THE REVIEW

I have never felt like a fountain, releasing tears and eventually shattering, crashing to the ground in a thousand pieces.

Yet it happened. It happened while listening to the marked love in the new songs of Antony, those contained in this "Another World", a brief EP of five songs that heralds the release of the album "The Crying Light", coming on January 20, 2009.

It is love that vibrates in the sorrowful notes of a fiery piano, enveloped in darkness. It is love in the voice, sometimes restless, sometimes seductive of an Antony at his peak and increasingly animated, increasingly inhuman, seductive, vital.

Antony, with his thick fingers, sinks his love into the keys of that enchanted and magical piano of his, a sweet representation of an endless succession of black and white keys that hold intense emotions.

"Another World", the opening track, is pure love that sinks into the listener's ears with incredible effectiveness. It's the new "Hope There's Someone", marked by keys stroked with indescribable grace. It's a profoundly deep song that wounds, that makes you cry.

Antony is one of the few contemporary musicians capable of still providing emotions: but authentic ones, capable of unsettling your day with the touch of an instrument, capable of countering your contemporary feelings, turning them upside down.

"Crackhagen" is even more sorrowful than the previous one and penetrates under the skin, even deeper, scraping away at what's beneath: the heart, the muscles, the blood, the soul. "Shake The Devil" is the real jazzy turn: it starts with slow-motion notes, giving the initial desolate song an almost liturgical and sacred importance, but the more the song progresses, the more one is sucked into a dark and relentless vortex. This vortex drags the song into a triumph of percussion and trumpets, on which the voice now cut on jazz-blues nuances surprises and leaves the listener literally stunned. You feel disoriented but filled: filled with vertiginous sensations of filia and death. "Sing For Me" is the more conventional Antony, yet more poignant: divided between those notes breathed in a wintry, snowy sky. An emotional interlude leading to the incredible "Hope Mountain", the dizzying peak of the entire EP: a poem thrown to the sky in the form of tears, whispered, tossed into the flesh with the insistence of a newly opened rose.

This record is love. Pure love. Love for music.