Only an artist of rare talent can wear his influences clearly on his sleeve and have the self-assurance to duet with a number of them on his group's sophomore record.
Antony, the lead singer and principal songwriter of Antony and the Johnsons, is that uniquely talented artist, and I Am a Bird Now is that record.
Antony sings over subdued, sophisticated piano and string arrangements with an expressive gentleness that harkens back to Boy George, a bittersweet croon that is indebted to Morrissey and a Rufus Wainwright-like embracement of the vocals and instruments of the pre-rock era. And somehow the sound and album that come out are all his own.
Nowhere is his command more apparent than on his duets with guest artists. Though he shares \What Can I Do?"" with Wainwright and ""You Are My Sister"" with Boy George, at no point does he lose ground to their considerable vocal skills. And even with Lou Reed appearing on ""Fistful of Love"" with some fitful guitar playing and a bit of spoken word, the show remains focused on Antony.
Though Antony's voice conjures up a vast array of influences, he somehow manages to keep command of every moment of the album.
Does this mean his songwriting trumps Reed's, or that his vocals blow Wainwright out of the water? Not quite. With I Am a Bird Now, Antony might not match his influences in terms of quality, but he does manage to keep a sound all his own by doing something remarkable in today's music scene: Saying something that almost no one else will.
His lyrics might not seem revolutionary, but they are words that so rarely come from the lips of a male lead singer: ""For today I am a boy / One day I'll grow up and be a beautiful woman / but for today I am a child ... One day I'll grow up and feel the power in me.""
""For Today I Am a Boy"" paints masculinity as childish and betrays Antony's wish to ""grow up"" to have the power he sees in women. Instead of subverting his command, this shedding of masculinity makes Antony more powerful.
The album's finest moment, unsurprisingly, is the one shared with rock god Lou Reed-the transcendent ""Fistful of Love."" It opens with Reed reciting a brief monologue over restrained piano and drums playing. He promises to let his lover know exactly how he feels , and then Antony's delicate croon takes over to fulfill that promise.
The song slowly and deliberately works itself up from this minimalism until it explodes into an almost religious ecstatic fervor, with Reed's guitar distortions filling the background, a saxophone wailing along with Antony and a horn section that gets progressively louder and catchier.
Like all of Antony's songs, ""Fistful of Love"" is reminiscent of something else (in this case, the fervor of the Velvet Underground's ""New Age""), but in the end impresses upon its listener a sound and emotion that is all Antony.
