Oct 16, 2015. Antony & The Johnsons – Crying Light LP Aphrohead – Resurrection 2LP* Arcade Fire – Funeral LP Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti – Before Today LP Ata Kak. Eagles Of Death Metal – Zipper Down LP Elliott Smith – Roman Candle LP Esmerine – Lost Voices LP, S/T LP* Express Rising – Fixed Rope LP*. Oct 22, 2009. One of the artists that has recorded in the state-of-the-art facility at Blue Rock Artist Ranch and Studio in Wimberley, Texas, Grace Pettis, has been named one of the five co-winners of the 2009 Mountain Stage® NewSong International Finals, and she will be part of a “Mountain Stage” broadcast in.

Tomorrow is Yeah, the name is still a little strange to me too – were there ever stores that just sold cassettes? Regardless, we’ll have an array of exclusive CSD releases available, alongside some new local cassette releases from the likes of Chris Donaldson, Johnny Ledez, and Yankee Roses. Seems like there’s a mixed-bag reaction to cassettes in general these days, but allow me to put forth the argument that the format has remained and will remain alive and well because it’s best suited to small/independent/experimental releases. When you consider that making vinyl costs 10x more, and even making CDs is 3x more, cassettes are a no-brainer. With the addition of a download code, the cassette is the best bang-for-your-buck format for bands and fans alike – you get a physical thing and a digital non-thing for only $5 (in most cases).

Come hang on CSD, buy some tapes, listen to Team Sweat play some tapes, and get 10% off vinyl since tapes can’t have all the fun! -MLE Unwind with new releases, reissues and restocks!!! – As If 2LP* A Tribe Called Quest – Midnight Marauders 2LP Alabama Shakes – Sound & Color (Clear) 2LP Aleister Crowley – The Evil Beast LP* Alexandre Desplat – Harry Potter & The Deathly Hollows Pt. 2 2LP* Animal Collective – Sung Tongs 2LP Antony & The Johnsons – Crying Light LP Aphrohead – Resurrection 2LP* Arcade Fire – Funeral LP Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti – Before Today LP Ata Kak – Obaa Sima LP Atoms For Peace – AMOK 2LP Babes In Toyland – Fontanelle LP Beach House – Thank Your Lucky Stars LP* Beatles – S/T (White Album, Mono) 2LP, Rubber Soul LP, Yellow Submarine LP Beirut – No No No LP Belle & Sebastian – Dear Catastrophe Waitress 2LP, If You’re Feeling Sinister LP, The Boy With The Arab Strap LP Blackalicious – Imani Vol. Tuesday, 12/12: Emerge Miami Meeting, 7-8pm. Wednesday, 12/13: Lolo’s Choice Music Break at Deja Vu Audio South!

Sweat’s founder selects her favorite album sides to be played on Deja Vu’s stunning equipment at this casual mixer. Full info here.

Saturday, 12/16: Our final live show of 2017! Live@Sweat presents the incredibly talented DAMA VICKE + PAULA MARFIL! 7-10pm, free, all ages welcome.. Sunday, 12/17: Come out for the last Classic Album Sundays of 2017 as we celebrate the 25th anniversary of DR. DRE’s The Chronic (1992), and we’ll be warming up with PARLIAMENT’s Mothership Connection (1975). Hear both albums like never before on a next-level sound system provided by Deja Vu Audio South.

5-8pm, all ages welcome. Tickets on sale now at •.

MOJO Antony & The Johnsons Islington Academy November 2, 2004 By Paul Gorman The extraordinary NYC androgyne - whose in-concert performances make Lou Reed cry - receives a stiffer-lipped but no less rapturous London reception. Slinking on stage amid a blue and purple-lit haze created by a belching smoke machine, the dishevelled choirboy known simply as Antony - in ruffled collar and oversize pink mohair sweater - slipped unannounced onto the piano stool at the Islington Academy for one of the most highly anticipated performances of the year. PITCHFORKMEDIA.COM REVIEW OF ANTONY's 'The Lake' on Antony: 'The Lake' For a long time in the literary community, Edgar Allen Poe was viewed as a bit of a joke, seen as a sort of silly horror author whose stories were only entertaining to children (or like-minded adults). He has since gained credibility, despite the heavy juvenile pall that hangs over his work.

Anyone that still doubts his value, however, should be pointed to Antony's breathtaking rendition of 'The Lake' to quickly overcome any reservations as to Poe's emotional impact. Originally issued on the Split EP with Current 93 Live at St. Olave's Church 2002 (which explains the otherwise anomalous presence of the declaration, 'Tonight it's just the two of us,' at the end of the track), 'The Lake' has now been made available to a slightly wider audience, as the closing track to Devendra Banhart's Golden Apples of the Sun compilation.

The exposure befits the song's intimacy, as being released on the relatively obscure PanDurtro label and a limited edition (though critically acclaimed) compilation makes its discovery akin to the narrator's finding of the titular lake, drawing out both the terror and excitement of the hypnotic power of a memento mori. By presenting the song simply through a piano and his powerful voice, Antony allows the haunting lyrics to fully resonate, and contradicts any assertions of emotional irrelevance. After this song, it's difficult to look at Poe's poem with snobbish indifference anymore: Antony's performance is so powerful that it may force that appreciation to spread throughout Poe's entire oeuvre. [Nathan Humpal; August 23rd; 2004 (4.5 stars of 5) June/July 2003 WITH LOU REED Once you've seen Antony perform his searing, personal, completely modern take on the torch song, you'll understand why he's attracting admirers like Lou Reed. Over the past few years, Antony and his band The Johnsons have been making converts out of audiences at small New York venues like The Zipper and The Knitting Factory with songs about isolation, anxiety, and blurred sexual identity. This summer, Antony will accompany Lou Reed as a guest vocalist on his European and American tours. Then, in the fall, Antony will release his new album, I Am a Bird Now.

Lou invites Antony over to his studio to compare notes about life and art. LOU: You've got a really phenomenal, multi-octave voice. When you were a kid, did you say to yourself, 'Hey, I've got a great range and vibrato'?

ANTONY: No, but I was in the choir in school. I went to a magnet school for the performing arts in San Jose. The armpit of Silicon Valley. I was fortunate.

It was probably the only high school in the area where I wouldn't have been duct-taped to a tree and spat on. I was also the lead singer and songwriter for a death rock band. Did you scream and have hair down to your shoulders? ANTONY: There was a little bit of screaming going on, yes, and I did have long hair.

I was quite androgynous. LOU: So why did you come to New York when you could have stayed in California? ANTONY: I saw the documentary Mondo New York about the underground cabaret scene during the 80s. I loved those performers. Joey Arias, Dean Johnson, Phoebe Legere. They were so elegant and punk. Joey singing 'A Hard Day's Night' dressed as Billie Holiday inspired me.

So I went off to N.Y.U. I was nineteen. LOU: What did you major in? ANTONY: Experimental theater. My degree is about as useful as a degree in knitting. Basically, I moved to New York to go to the Pyramid Club. I came to the city looking for signs of life that appealed to me. Logitrace Serial Keygenreter there.

I wound up spending a lot of time on the piers. LOU: I have friends who complain about how the piers were cleaned up. But they don't know what's still going on there at night.

Some of the docks don't have lights. There's plenty of activity out there. It's just patrolled.

ANTONY: But the old wooden piers were so beautiful. In the summer, they were like rocks covered with seals. There would be three hundred oiled, naked fags lying out in the sun. It was an outrageous cultural moment.

LOU: When I was in college, I got to know the poet Delmore Schwartz. Without him things could have taken a very ugly turn. ANTONY: Wasn't he a big influence on your early poetry? LOU: Absolutely. He was a big influence on my life. I had this incredibly talented writer sitting next to me at the bar every day. ANTONY: Was that where you took all of your classes?

[laughs] It was like something out of a novel. I did actually meet him at a bar every morning.

He was so funny and smart it was staggering. He wrote a short story called 'In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.' It's only five pages long, written in the simplest language you can imagine, yet it's brilliant.

Incredibly emotional. I found it very inspirational. He always carried around a letter from T.S. Eliot extolling its virtues. ANTONY: What happened to him? LOU: He died in the Hotel Dixie in Times Square.

Some kind of heart attack probably brought on by amphetamines, liquor, and God knows what else. He hit a home run right off the bat, and it was hard for him to stay up there. Baboom, there it is.

How do you live up to that? How do you make it happen again? After I wrote the song 'Heroin,' people said, 'Now what can you do?' I was only twenty and I thought, 'I'm finished already? I shot my wad, that's it?' ANTONY: You know, a lot of people tell me that my songs are too self-indulgent, too full of sorrow and grief. LOU: It amazes me that you're accused of self-indulgence simply for putting some feeling into your work.

ANTONY: People are terrified of emotion. Most of the art in New York right now is pop and superficial, with a thin layer of cynicism and irony. When I started performing, AIDS was bringing about a cultural apocalypse in New York. I think of the piers as the Native American burial grounds for homosexuals. The people who survived were like war veterans. They were shell-shocked for years.

I arrived in New York after the bomb dropped, but I was still preoccupied with this feeling of the cloud that had swept over the land. Some of my favorite artists died.

LOU: Where did you find your first artistic venue in New York? ANTONY: I did late-night performances with this troupe of bedraggled after-hours types at the Pyramid Club. The aesthetic was blood bags and gore, lots of outrageousness and beauty. I worked with these trannies and drag queens. Each was a beautiful individual who had an incredibly strong sense of themself. We took turns writing scripts.

I loved arranging them. Giving them songs to sing, characters to play. LOU: The movement I was involved in when I started out was made up of the same kinds of people. ANTONY: Besides being the resident den mother, I would punctuate each show with a torch song. Eventually I wanted to focus on my own work. I was in over my head trying to manage so many other people. LOU: Almost no one can do that.

Andy was able to do it, but the mortality rate over at Warhol University was pretty high. A lot of students didn't make it across that river. So you started performing on your own? ANTONY: I started another performance group. We were staging surrealist plays about hermaphrodites searching for their parents at the end of the world. Cast Software Vs Sonar Advanced on this page.

I realized there was a limited market for that kind of production, so I decided to record an album. Before that, I had been recording keyboard arrangements on a four-track tape recorder and singing along over them when I performed. LOU: I had a six-track recorder, believe it or not.

ANTONY: Everyone wants those old machines now. They have a beautiful, warm sound. Old bits of tape have a nice bit of hiss as well.

LOU: I hate tape hiss, I really do. Nor do I like skipping or popping sounds on records.

There is room for progress. Did you already know all the musicians in The Johnsons when you got together?

ANTONY: I did know my drummer, Todd, from Blacklips. I put an ad for string players in the Voice, but nobody in the current group answered it.

I met all the rest through other musicians. The ensemble slowly came into its current incarnation. Two violins, a cello, and a bass. The string trio is second to none, and they look as good as they sound. LOU: Yeah, it's like a modeling agency. There isn't a snaggletooth nerd among them. ANTONY: I'm the biggest snaggletooth in the band, even though I'm the lead singer.

I'm the anomaly in front of all these beautiful creatures. LOU: You are very beautiful onstage. You have moments. ANTONY: I used to want to be an androgynous archetype. I presented myself as a drag character, Fiona Blue. But now performing has become more intimate for me. Back then, I wanted to see just how far I could push a drunk nightclub audience.

It was a challenge. I would go onstage at 2 a.m. And try to transform the room in three minutes.

See if I could make the whole drunk crowd cry their heads off. LOU: How did you know you could do that? ANTONY: I had a more aggressive, military approach in those days. I was inspired by Diamanda Galas's cutthroat approach to emotional communication. When I went to one of her shows, I literally felt my asshole getting ripped out. Her music went right through me like knives.

I thought that maybe I could do something like that, but with a certain tenderness, a feeling that wasn't as much about rage as it was about grief. LOU: It takes enormous talent to communicate emotion like that. ANTONY: I wouldn't cry but I would hold the tears inside myself. I really tried to manipulate the crowd. Since then, I've tried to work more from my internal reality.

Much of my material is borne from isolation and my desire to move beyond it. I like to think of my work as a type of soul music. Not so much in style, but in essence. LOU: Certain soul music just kills me to this day.

ANTONY: I can't stop listening to Otis Redding at the moment. I'm totally obsessed with him. LOU: The first time I put on Ray Charles' 'What I Say' I started crying the minute it began.

What a freeing experience. Thank God for music that shows you that there are other forms of life out there besides white-bread suburbia. ANTONY: I feel the same way. I heard Ray Charles's cover of 'Yesterday' toward the end of high school, and it changed my life. LOU: Certain music can knock your socks off if it's consistently emotional, every last bit of it.

You deal in emotions, as do I. I admire that about you. It's hard to do and very hard to do song after song. When we tour, I think we're going to have a very emotional show.

PAPER Magazine May 2003 With a voice reminiscent of soul priestess Nina Simone and a style that stirs up memories of the legendary costume artist Leigh Bowery, Antony writes gorgeous, crystal-pure tunes with titles like 'Cripple and the Starfish,' 'Atrocities' and 'I Fell in Love with a Dead Boy' -- all possessing a silvery, sweetly masochistic intensity. Back in the early '90s, he performed with Blacklips, a collective of what he calls 'toothless perverts, drag queens and punk women,' appearing at such groundbreaking venues as the East Village's Pyramid club. When Blacklips disbanded in 1995, he formed a new group, the Johnsons, which eventually focused on music, his primary passion. Since then, he and the Johnsons have released two CDs, and they'll be recording a third this spring. As if that's not enough, Antony has just provided backup vocals and a cover of the classic 'Perfect Day' for Lou Reed's latest opus, The Raven, which was inspired by the work of Edgar Allan Poe. Now he's filming an upcoming indie feature, Wild Side, directed by acclaimed French auteur Sebastien Lifshitz (Come Undone).

He'll also tour with Reed this May and appear in a Seattle festival curated by Laurie Anderson. Antony's stage patter is witty, and his manner can be camp, but don't ever call him 'arch.' He has no patience with the overly self-conscious, distanced cool affected by so many hipsters these days. 'In the world of 2003,' he says, 'hope and sincerity are the new punk.' The Berkshire Eagle March 12, 2003 Antony and the Johnsons by Seth Rogovoy (NORTH ADAMS, Mass., March 9, 2003) Ð Saturday night's concert by Antony and the Johnsons at Mass MoCA was a bit like a dream -- that is, if your dreams are directed by David Lynch, with his typical undercurrent of subterranean, sublimated anxiety, sexual or otherwise. Singer Antony, who writes most of his own material, cut an exotic figure with his heavenly heartbreaking tenor and his effeminate mien. He sang of the pain of love (and vice versa) in an inordinately heightened, emotional state intended to resolve itself through a kind of soulful transcendence or catharsis.

His band, the Johnsons -- really a small orchestra -- aided Antony in his efforts with artful arrangements of his cabaret compositions. Violinists Joan Wasser and Maxim Moston were credited with the gorgeous arrangements, which were fleshed out with finesse by electric bassist Jeff Langston, pianist Jason Hart, drummer Todd Cohen and guest cellist Michele Schifferle. If you closed your eyes, you could have been fooled into thinking you were hearing the voice of a black soul singer Ð a Smokey Robinson or Otis Redding, say, suddenly struck with an exaggerated vibrato and a plaintive streak. Antony channeled the melismatic style of singing that soul inherited from gospel -- the dance of several notes to put across a single syllable -- which only heightened the built-in tension provided by lyrics like 'Forgive me, let live me, set my spirit free,' and 'I am very happy/So please hit me.' But subtlety was exaggeration's equal, which is what kept Antony's performance from succumbing to camp. Most of his songs spoke to universal themes of the pain of love (and vice versa).

This was played out to the utmost on a simple blues in which he sang, 'Be my husband and I'll be your wife.' The lyrics were utterly typical of Delta-style, country blues, but the undercurrent -- the David Lynch factor -- was the intensity of the focus on domination and submission within a loving relationship. Blues, or even conventional love songs, will likely never sound the same to anyone who attended Antony's performance. Antony has become something of a protege of Lou Reed's, and he concluded his sold-out performance in MoCA's Club B-10 with an apt reading of Reed's 'Candy Says,' linking this concert to many previous ones at MoCA by Reed-connected and Velvet Underground-influenced artists, including Patti Smith, Cowboy Junkies, Luna and Little Jimmy Scott. And the Club B-10 itself continues to grow in character, taking on the aspect of a real nightclub. March 27th 2001 Exquisite Corpse: Antony and the Johnsons deliver ethereal, unsettling love songs by Kurt B. Reighley Singularly named singer Antony is no ordinary mortal.

The 20-something New Yorker boasts an unconventional back story—born in England, raised in California—but the minute he lifts his otherworldly voice, one wonders if he even hails from this galaxy. Echoes of Nina Simone, Brian Ferry's early Roxy Music performances, and even cabaret great Mabel Mercer occasionally resonate through his quavering quasiclassical delivery. But ultimately, Antony is peerless. Framed by nine-piece chamber music-performance art ensemble the Johnsons, Antony's instrument carries no identifiable markings of gender or age, allowing him to sound blissfully naive one moment, seasoned and sage the next. And neither his visual presentation—white-faced androgyny a la performance artist Leigh Bowery and new wave icon Klaus Nomi—nor the lyrics on the group's self-titled debut album from 2000 anchors his persona in terra firma any more securely.

Born from a realm of black water and flickering candles, haunting numbers including 'Twilight' and 'River of Sorrow' play like lost Shakespearean sleepwalking scenes, while others ('Rapture,' 'Atrocities') invoke powerful spiritual imagery enhanced by Antony's extraterrestrial deportment. Yet the most arresting moment on the nine-track debut is the one that comes closest to a traditional rock song.

Downplaying strings and woodwinds in favor of piano and drums, the penultimate 'Divine' pays homage to the drag legend (Antony's 'self-determined guru'), building in excitement as the singer rips into the line 'I hold your burning heart in my hands' with gospel fervor. Contrasted with the dreamlike feel of the rest of the program, this down-and-dirty outburst reveals an unexpected dimension of Antony's character. Perhaps he is human after all.

That spirit persists on the new three-song EP 'I Fell in Love with a Dead Boy' (which also includes covers of Julee Cruise's 'Mysteries of Love' and Current 93's 'Soft Black Stars'): Antony's growing more comfortable walking among earthlings, although he's still in no danger of slipping unnoticed into the crowd. Proclaiming his love for a corpse, the singer celebrates this unconventional amour in a reading that invokes sorrow and happiness simultaneously, recalling Billie Holiday's pre-sob sister recordings of the '30s. 'Are you a boy or a girl?' He queries his new love, far more absorbed in asking the question than awaiting an answer. It's a sentiment that appreciative Antony and the Johnsons listeners should have no trouble sharing. Www.advocate.com photo by Mathu and Zaldy The Brain a weekly digest from the staff at Brainwashed V03I13 www.brainwashed.com ANTONY & THE JOHNSONS Live at Joe's Pub, the New York Public Theater, April 11, 2000 I first heard Antony & the Johnsons' recently released single with something like horror. Everything about it was all wrong to my ears: the suave orchestration seemed undermined by melodramatic, effete vocals, the baby-talk phrasing collided uncomfortably with surprisingly harsh subject matter, and intimations of a smooth as silk Julee Cruise vibe seemed absolutely undone by the Pavarotti-like force of Antony's titanic vocals.

But since nothing is quite as fascinating as horror, I found myself returning repeatedly to 'Cripple and the Starfish', and to my utter surprise discovered that I was hooked. Despite a long fondness for the work of David Tibet, who wisely snatched up Antony & the Johnsons for his label, I've been worried that all my glowing praise of this band might be terribly premature, having heard only one song. So I was glad to see they'd be playing in my neighborhood, and more than a little curious about what I might be in store for. I arrived two hours early at the posh Joe's Pub in the New York Public Theatre, which filled up early to an extremely enthusiastic crowd. Although I had expected an army of goth teenagers (the band has just been signed by the excellent English label World Serpent, famous forum to a family of darkly intelligent musical cosmonauts including Current 93 and Nurse With Wound), the audience was a surprisingly glamorous cross-section of East Village culture. The show began with a brief performance piece by satanic belly-dancer Johanna Constantine. Scantily dressed, breasts and face smeared with what appeared to be blood and bile, and sporting a pair of devil horns worthy of Tim Curry, she undulated about the stage flexing and folding ten-inch-long fingers to music in near darkness.

Afterwards the band was introduced by hostess Julia Yasuda, described in the playbill as having been 'born in a hermaphroditic condition during WWII.' As the nine-piece band came onstage (clarinet, sax, piano, drums, flute, bass, cello, and two violins), Village drag hostess Justin Bond, leaned over from the next seat to assure me that I was about to be amazed. And I was amazed. Dressed in a shoulderless frock, androgynous Antony took possession of the stage with the irresistible power of a superstar. Unfolding out of vulnerability and physical hesitancy, his remarkably powerful voice sang with a riveting and deeply moving intensity.

The only comparisons I could find were to heroic artists like Judy Garland and Ella Fitzgerald. In retrospect, it is precisely the initially jarring incongruity of the elements of this music that I now find so compelling, and the remarkable finesse with which Antony holds them in tension which makes me conclude that this is an artist worth paying attention to. Antony literally personifies this tension in his unusual occupation of gender positions. He's a boy who dresses vaguely like a girl, and yet in no way does he impersonate femininity—he's unmistakably a boy, and yet, onstage at least, he's unmistakably a girl.

Not once during his brilliant version of Nina Simone's 'Be My Husband' did it even occur to me that there might be some irony in his declaration 'I'll be your wife.' This strikes me as radically different from the culturally enshrined varieties of gender-bending we've all seen.

Just as his voice suggests a delicacy which can only be described as muscular, his lyrics reflect another tension between innocence and experience. In many ways this resembles the work of Marc Almond—the cabaret stylings, a playful disregard for gender orthodoxy, preoccupation with the subterranean and nocturnal—but where Almond carries his experience like a torch, Antony's lyrics move through darkness without ever seeming to lose their innocence. Part Evel Kneivel and part Maria Callas, Antony plays out with a kind of death-defying bravery the gestures of opening himself to the world. Similarly, a large part of the emotional punch these breathtaking songs carry seems to come from an almost compulsive movement between happiness and suffering which runs through the work. In the extraordinary 'Hitler in My Heart' he sings 'Don't punish me / for wanting your love inside of me,' while in 'Cripple and the Starfish' he pleads, 'I am very, very happy, so please hurt me.' This gesture of informing emotions with their opposites (he explains, 'I always wanted love to be / filled with pain and bruises') transforms his songs into deliciously painful pleasures.

The songs (like his chats between songs) often oscillated between easy humor and loss, as in the haunting 'I fell in love with a dead boy', or his cover of the Ronettes' 'So Young', and he deftly seasons one with the other for an effect which is truly remarkable. I can't think of anything more illustrative than his description of having brought a house to tears while performing Gloria Gaynor's 'I Will Survive' as Anne Frank in a Holocaust-themed show in Germany. This aversion to the uni-dimensional extends even to the orchestration (which seamlessly moved between vigorous Cure 'Pornography'-era drumming and fragile compositions for clarinet and strings), the opening performer (whose slippage between beautifully erotic and repulsively aquatic strikes me as a perfect introduction to this carnival of contradictions), and even the hermaphroditic hostess. It now seems to me that my initial dislike of this music, which was really a kind of embarrassed shock, was primarily a response to the overwhelming risk taken by the singer. With dazzling audacity Antony is defying genre, convention, and a multitude of borders in order to articulate complex experiences which most listeners are probably not accustomed to hearing celebrated: songs of the rage and agony of love, the blissful joy of grief, the diamond-like ferocity of true tenderness, charity and grace.

Although Antony complained of hoarseness (and even hurled the cigarettes of an entire nearby table of smokers across the room at one point), the sheer force of his voice was unaffected, and the musicians exhibited a well-practiced ease, even though several of them were new to the troupe. This was easily one of the best shows I've seen in years. Antony and the Johnsons' CD 'Blue Angel' is fantastic and will be out on World Serpent by the end of the month. They will be performing three more shows at Joe's Pub in the next month, and the not-to-be-missed April 30 show will feature performances with legendary Little Annie Anxiety and David Tibet. – Thomas Olson THE WIRE Issue 197 July 2000 ANTONY & THE JOHNSONS Durtro 050CD Antony & The Johnsons self-titled debut is such an inspired combination—hallucinogenic Blakean vision married to gospel bombast and soaring strings—that leaves you wondering why no one thought of it before.The glorious heavy boom of Antony's voice is as fallen as Scott Walker's circa Scott 4. The English-born Antony lives in New York, where he assembled The Johnsons to record the material he had worked up for his late night cabarets at NYC's Pyramid Club. The Johnsons are a fantastic group, utilising saxophone, piano, harp, bass, drums and elegiac strings.

At their best, on 'River of Sorrow', they drive Antony's vocal with the grace and drama of The Bad Seeds. 'Cripple And The Starfish', previously released as a split single with Current 93, sounds as baffling and as upsetting in its fuller CD context. But Antony really scales the heights on 'Rapture'. Introduced by a resigned piano, sky-splitting strings open a gap for the singer to unleash his litany of fallen family and friends by way of realising his sad take on rapture. Otis Redding couldn't have done a better job. - David Keenan VILLAGE VOICE, NYC January 30th 2001 THE SOUND OF THE CITY: Candy Darling It's usually bad juju when a singer calls time-out mid-way through his latest single, so when Antony and the Johnsons hit pause during the radiant 'I Fell in Love with a Dead Boy' on January 12th, folks were poised for the worst. Given the barroom tunes bleeding through the Knitting Factory walls, a tantrum would've been understandable, but Antony chose jelly beans over vitriol, rakishly distributing candy to fey admirers and baffled hipsters alike before starting the number anew.

Such droll conviviality comes melded to the man's haunting, unabashedly robust compositions, While the bittersweet contrast has prompted comparisons to Otis Redding and Judy Garland, there's a canny precision to Antony dubbing Divine his 'self-determined guru.' The departed femme fatale—his womanhood crafted from wholesale defiance—existed as a primal vision of the autonomous (though not untroubled) sexuality that fuels Antony's music and booming, keening voice. Disarmingly childlike, his stage presence twines innocence to decidedly polymorphous perversity, as precocious renditions of the Ronettes' 'So Young' (natch) and 'Cripple and the Starfish' aptly demonstrated. Likewise, in the Johnsons' latest reworking of Nina Simone's 'Be My Husband,' ambling cello and a breathtaking crush of violin stroked the jailbate sauciness of Antony's vocals. But 'River of Sorrow' and the Julee Cruise stunner 'Mysteries of Love' (Antony here clutching at words as if they were long-flown memories) conjured dusky cabaret melancholia, further mottling the night's coquetry. Still, the chauteuse caught in this dwindling spotlight couldn't give himself over entirely to gloom and doom. The sole encore ('Twilight,' no less) found him plopping Deitrich-style into the lap of a potential sugar daddy.

'Are you his wife?' Antony blithely inquired of the fellow's female companion. 'I would've brought you a chocolate drop.' —Nick Rutigliano THE SOUND PROJECTOR 8ighth Issue 2000 www.supergraphics.demon.co.uk/soundprojector Antony and the Johnsons United Kingdom, DURTRO 050CD (2000) The first album by Antony and the Johnsons is a truly rare thing, a debut that doesn't merely show promise but announces the arrival of a fully formed, major talent. It's an extraordinary collection of modern torch songs, each one a perfect concentration of emotive vocals and vivid instrumental colors.

For bringing this beautiful creation to our attention, as for so much else, we have to thank David Tibet of Current 93, who was introduced to Antony in New York and, deeply affected by the then unreleased album, became his benevolent patron. The album appears on Tibet's Durtro label. This is not the first time that Tibet has given prominence via his label to wayward, neglected talents; English folk singer Shirley Collins, Krautrockers Sand and (more dubiously) Tiny Tim have all benefited from his patronage. But these were essentially archival releases, intended to make available once again records from the past which would otherwise have lain dormant. Antony, on the other hand, is utterly of the present; and yet his songs have a dreamlike, yearning quality that equally makes them timeless. Antony sings his baroque texts in a richly soulful voice that could melt the stoniest of hearts, while the Johnsons deliver an inspired soundtrack of strings, piano, woodwind and percussion. The music's glorious emotional swell fortifies the listener even as the words tell unbearably of pain, death and atrocity.

There is a dark anguish here that moves from nakedly personal confessions to tender elegies for lost friends and poetic meditations on the state of the world. Under Antony's sorrowful gaze, this anguish assumes an overwhelming density, weighing down these songs tragically and unforgettably.

Richard Rees Jones.