Out of my stereo came his startling, other-worldly voice, the sound of someone enraptured -- or maybe possessed. He seemed to embody his dire ballad, rather than to merely perform it.
When music writer Barry Alfonso wrote that, he was recalling his first listen to Appalachian folk legend John Jacob Niles. But it would have been just as appropriate if written about Antony Hegarty, the transcendental singer of Antony and the Johnsons.
In 1959, Tradition Records put out "An Evening with John Jacob Niles," a collection of folk songs performed, inhabited and stretched to frightening limits by the so-called Dean of American Balladeers. It was Niles' second record on the label. Fifty years later, Antony and the Johnsons have just released their second album on the Secretly Canadian label, the stunning and stirring "The Crying Light" (2009).
If you're concerned with concretes like era and instrumentation, you'll find little tying these two albums together. But after one listen to both singers, with their unnerving tremolos and haunting high notes, the bond is undeniable.
Niles was a dulcimer-toting Appalachian folk musician, albeit a notably worldly one. Antony, meanwhile, is a British bandleader with an expert group of musicians providing a bright, floating landscape for his elegiac vocals. Still, the two artists' ultimate effects are similar.
Eager genre labelers have done their best to fit Antony's music into categories, often calling it baroque pop or folk. It's neither, of course, but the roots of such brandings are apparent. The Johnsons sound nothing like a rock band and everything like a mini pit orchestra backing some arty off-Broadway musical; the baroque tag grows out of this. The folk categorization comes from the music's soft, acoustic bent and the fact that it all revolves around Antony's storytelling. After all, it is more common in today's alt-pop world for lyrics to play second fiddle to the music's overall aesthetic. Most reviewers, unfortunately, give only cursory attention to the lyrics when discussing new music. Antony and the Johnsons make this an impossibility.
Antony's poetry would be beautiful with or without his emotive vibrato. Some of the songs on "The Crying Light" have a puzzling, shrouded quality that can liberate and empower the listener. On "Kiss My Name," for instance, Antony weeps, "And my tears have turned to snow/ I'm only a child/ Born upon a grave/ Dancing through the stations/ Calling out my name." In other instances, his songs' understatement and brevity render them all the more revealing. On the title track, Antony sings, "Inside myself/ The secret grows/ My own shelter/ Agony goes/ Crying light, the crying light/ I was born to adore you."
Niles was never opaque. Nevertheless, the folk songs he interprets and the way he presents them can be as eerie and obsessively fatalist as Antony's work. For instance, "The Black Dress" is a tale of a "forlorn" and "forsaken" young bride that Niles, with the force of his voice, puts into a frightening, nocturnal fantasy world, and the wistfulness of "The Turtle Dove" feels like a clear predecessor to Antony's songs of emptiness. But Antony goes further than Niles. He does not simply sing about past tragedies or loss in the traditional sense; his forborne malaise seems to reach into the future. It feels as if it could continue indefinitely.
A compelling and especially poignant side of Niles comes out when he sings his most famous original songs, such as "Go 'Way from my Window" (yes, that's what Dylan was referring to) and "I Wonder as I Wander." Unfortunately, you will have to look deeper into his largely inaccessible catalog to find these -- the easiest way to do so is on another Tradition Records LP, "I Wonder as I Wander" (1957).
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Giovanni Russonello is a junior majoring in political science. He can be reached at Giovanni.Russonello@tufts.edu.
