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Antony, sans Johnsons
"N-O-T S-O-B," said Antony Hegarty, who plays the piano, and sings like some sort of buttery, meringue-topped pie. "It's Boston, backwards."
Joined onstage by a small chamber orchestra, he didn't need to sacrifice all Nico Muhly's lush arrangements from The Crying Light. "Kiss My Name" batted us about with strings, and an amazing guitar solo fleshed out the previous album's masochistic "Fistful of Love." Oblique, brooding metaphors were packed into the handclappingly catchy "Shake That Devil."
"Epilepsy Is Dancing" was a lovely, bouncy thing that we'd play for our moms if it weren't titled "Epilepsy Is Dancing."
Antony sang Beyoncé's "Crazy In Love" with fierce conviction, over driving percussion and awash in strings. If there was irony present, we couldn't taste it.
"You can't top perfection," he declared. "But you can sidle up next to it." And then repeated. And then made the audience repeat. And then made the audience repeat, to each other, with arms in the air and faux-British accents.
Antony also advised an audience member to recover to from his traumatic Boston driving experience through faith healing, prescribing loose-fitting garments, a laying-on of hands, and turn in powdered sugar.
The first pleasant surprise of the night, though, was Antony's friend and former Blacklips Performance Cult colleague Johanna Constantine.* She arrived in ethereal robes that made her arms look impossibly long and a cloud of David Lynchesque noise, and proceeded to move about in strange, mesmerizing ways that weren't quite dance. She flew in place like a skeletal bird, in dripping paint and pointy crutches and techno, and then clawed about like an androgynous 3D fighting game villain (specifically, Voldo from Soul Calibur).
She returned, later, with a fruit basket: Antony awarded a "door prize" to an the one audience member who didn't own a MacBook.
*Named for John's great-great-aunt or whatever?
Photograph by Jason Rothenberg.
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Wait, was that just a tossed off Hellblazer allusion or the actual source of her stage name? If the latter, that is the most emo thing I have heard today.
It was an honest question -- I don't know whether it's her real name (doubtful), or when it was that she might have adopted it (was it before the first appearance of the DC Comics character, in 1991?).