Antony & The Johnsons
I Am A Bird Now

THE REVIEW

Loneliness feels like it's taking root inside fertile ground such as the heart, which is slowly suffocated by a tourniquet, completely stopping the circulation of every blood flow and that oxygen, so vital.

Antony’s voice is not only inimitable but also of a painful, unparalleled beauty, an emotional suffering that you either love indescribably or avoid altogether, it is part of a still life yet lush nature.

Listening to "I Am a Bird Now" is the essence of a journey into a celestial and graceful body, obscured by unpredictable fate, it’s a reality little known because avoided out of fear, it’s a realistic dream and if it manages to capture your innermost part, then you will have to add it to the pantry of your emotions. His music is a continuous pulse of life agglomerated to the despair that cries out for help, a conscious and irreparable pain, consuming you day by day making the hours you have left to live colorless, like on the album cover, the "ambiguous" beauty of Candy Darling, Andy Warhol’s muse, captured by Peter Hujar on a hospital bed before leukemia took her away at the age of 30.

Ten tracks, like ten real daily stories lived by any of us, atrophied melancholies, distorted thoughts, intolerable misunderstandings, insensible guilty and praiseworthy attributions, desires that fight in fragile and uncertain daily life, changing and transforming through it, in search of a warm and indispensable embrace, full of soul, blues, and gospel. These tracks slowly insinuate on a sentimental epidermal level, tearing apart every presumption and exalting love.

Hope There's Someone - an angelic wingspan where organ, piano, a desperate and profoundly mournful voice drag you into an abyss;

My Lady Story pop-soul of crystalline fragility, piano, violins, and flutes hold hands in paralyzing ambiguity;

For Today I Am A Boy - dramatic sustained dialogues between piano and emphatic voice;

Man Is The Baby - an absolute masterpiece, piano, violins, and cello cannot be compared to anything else, because in this track, they represent the strongest pain I have ever heard;

You Are My Sister - the inevitable sweet drop that escapes from an eye flooded by a river in pain, the duet with Boy George is chilling, never have I heard Boy so "serious and profound"

What Can I Do? - Rufus Wainwright's voice is a bodily exploration;

Fistful Of Love - the introduction and guitar of Antony's "godfather, Lou Reed," is endless and rising like the track itself

Spiralling - a track with Devendra Banhart, chimes and oriental calls caressed, as always, by a very sweet piano;

Free At Last - a prayer told over the messages of Morse code and notes of a paralyzed piano, introducing the final song;

Bird Girl - Candy Darling has flown away forever, no longer burdened by her corporeal pain.

We always and infinitely need these masterpieces and these Artists, if the manifestation of their pain is understood and reflective, then they make us more visual and consequently more beautiful inside. An album that cannot go unnoticed because it is preeminent.