Antony and the Johnsons: Cut the World – review

(Rough Trade)

Reykjavik's grand new Harpa concert hall is a large, black, architecturally ambitious waterside edifice, a potent symbol of Iceland's economic recovery. After their banks failed in 2008, Icelanders agreed that the men were to blame, and replaced their head of state and other key posts with women. Bank boardrooms followed suit. The decision was taken to build the concert hall, even though the coffers were empty; four years after this female takeover, Iceland appears to be well on the road to recovery.

Judging by Future Feminism – a spoken manifesto played out on track two of this extraordinary live album – Harpa may just be Antony Hegarty's spiritual home. Live albums don't often contain seven-minute passages in which the artist brands him/herself a witch, has a go at the wrongheadedness of "sky gods" in a manner that would interest his fellow pop sky god-sceptic Julian Cope, and demands a system of governance where the testosterone tenets of greed, aggression and Armageddon are replaced by diametrically opposed feminine values. But Hegarty is no ordinary artist, as this album, recorded last year in Copenhagen with the Danish National Chamber Orchestra, proves once again.

Pitched somewhere between male and female, pop, soul and the avant garde, between the US and the UK, Hegarty's questioning suspension in these interzones have so far produced three affecting albums for piano and voice. Cut the World reprises 10 of his old songs, adds one new one (the title track) and Future Feminism, which is the kind of thing that will either get you punching the air as you did at Danny Boyle's Olympics opening ceremony, or crossing your legs and muttering about distrusting gender absolutes.

When he's not speaking in a delicate mid-Atlantic tone, or guffawing, as he does frequently on Future Feminism, you get the sense from Hegarty's forlorn yet authoritative warble that "home" is just as shard-like a concept as "gender". He would identify as a devoted citizen of the natural world, as Another World reminds us here; one considering refugee status when it all goes off. Originally from the 2008 EP of the same name, accompanied by the minimal, faintly menacing thrum of the orchestra, it's even more desolate than the original.

He has other homes too. A glance at the bill for Meltdown – the arts festival Hegarty has curated, which opened last week – shows that he was nurtured by New York's performance art underground. Here, his Epilepsy is Dancing – a very Lower East Side kind of song – gains new strings, both staccato and swelling. There's ample evidence, too, that Hegarty's childhood in Sussex has hardwired in him a love for British pop. Vocally, he has always resembled his hero Boy George – a white man with a black female soul voice – but bleached to the point of ghostliness and crossed with former Cocteau Twin Elizabeth Fraser. You Are My Sister is very George, with the quavers of Fraser and new opening woodwinds to boot.

It all comes, though, from a place close to Nina Simone. Hegarty says unsayable things in nuanced riddles. "For so long I've obeyed the feminine decree/ I always contain your desire to hurt me," goes Cut the World, stately with horn and flutes. It bodes elegantly for future studio albums.Hegarty has not, as yet, played at Harpa. With so many spiritual homes, he probably doesn't need another. Nevertheless, the affinity is striking, and needless to say, Harpa is not a skyscraper.

Contributor

Kitty Empire

The GuardianTramp

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