Few people have as haunting and beautiful a voice as Antony Hegarty, and perhaps nowhere has that been more prominently featured than on Antony and the Johnsons’ latest album Cut the World. It is a live album, but listeners may be easily fooled as this fact is not given away except for on the tracks "Future Feminism" (a spoken word track) and "Twilight" where Antony bids the audience thanks and farewell responded to by shouts and applause.
Many of the songs on this album are compiled from the previous studio albums of Antony and the Johnsons, except here the instrumentation and arrangement is quite different, with many of them featuring orchestration. Key points of the album are its opening track, which is a new song and the title song of the album, "Cut the World". The feel of the song is a great way to open this body of work and give listeners a taste of the musical fantasyland they are in for. The next high point is the song "Cripple and the Starfish" from the group’s first and self-titled album. It sounds like it is right out of a children’s fairy tale with its dark verses and bright melody line in the chorus. The third high point of Cut the World comes in the song "Swanlights", which is the title track from the group’s 2010 studio album. This arrangement features a lengthier and exquisitely performed orchestral introduction pushing the song to over seven minutes in length.
As stated previously, this is a live album. However, it does not feel like a live album, which means that the spoken-word track "Future Feminism" really feels out of place. If it were more apparent that this album were a live recording it would have felt right at home, as singers often go off on spoken rants in between songs. But with Cut the World it almost seems as though the group were taking strides to make it not feel this way, which is why this track feels, quite honestly, like an interruption in an otherwise soothing sea of music. Antony Hegarty has had what some might consider a tough go of it being transgender, so to his credit it is apparent that he is speaking about issues near and dear to his heart on this track, but at the end of the day it feels like it would have served the album as a whole to have not been included.
Overall, this album is worth it simply for that it is a new and entertaining take on songs that were already interesting on their own. One thing is for sure, Antony and the Johnsons do not allow themselves to settle for mediocrity and Cut the World is most definitely proof of that.
MP3 Stream: "Cripple and the Starfish"
