Anthony Hegarty – 'Cut The World' review
After four albums, reporting that Antony & the Johnsons’ latest record is intense, confessional, lush and frequently bizarre may be somewhat redundant, but even by Antony Hegarty’s idiosyncratic standards, Cut The World is a curious affair. A live album, performed in Copenhagen with the Danish National Chamber Orchestra, the second “track”, Future Feminism, is in fact a rambling eight-minute speech that rather sets the tone for the performance to come. In it, Hegarty reveals he’s “been thinking all day about the moon”, from which he then free-associates to treatises on menstruation in nature (good), sky gods (better), patriarchal monarchy (not so good) and the Pope (pretty evil), and concludes that “unless we move into feminist systems of governance, we don’t stand a chance”.
Like the rest of the album it’s stodgy stuff, delivered with a combination of unapologetic seriousness and the kind of conviction that only arises from not caring if people think you’re off your rocker, and the success of Cut The World boils down to how much one is willing to indulge Hegarty’s unique outlook. At its most bewitching, on centrepiece Swanlights, Hegarty’s treacly voice melts into the orchestral backing to make a compelling cauldron of melodrama and torch song, and while Fell In Love With A Dead Boy is hardly a song for all occasions, such gory blood-letting rarely sounded so exquisite.
Elsewhere, though, the spell is broken by overly floral arrangements (the unintentionally comic Kiss My Name) and his earlier bashing of Christian patriarchy makes a passionately sung Lord’s Prayer in The Rapture sound rather callow. But this isn’t just showing off – Hegarty’s eagerness to convert an audience to his world view is palpable. The trouble is that on the basis of Cut The World, only about half of it holds any appeal.
5/10
