Antony And The Johnsons

I Am A Bird Now
Secretly Canadian, 2005

The first time I heard artists like Bob Dylan and Nick Cave sing, I was too young to recognise anything peculiar about their voices. It's a wonderful thing to hear music like that for the first time – a feeling all pop fans wish they could revisit. Sadly, with the bastard by-products of experience, strange singers start to annoy as easily as amaze.

There's this moment on the opening track of I Am A Bird Now when the piano tumbles onto itself and teeters dangerously close to an enthusiastic rendition of 'Chopsticks'. It's a little childish and also quite thrilling, as if each note threatened to blow the whole act apart and expose it as some sort of second-grade joke. And the act does feel precarious. Antony's voice blends and eclipses all the usual clues of genre, race and gender, his music emulates early 20th-century blues, his dress takes inspiration from 1980s pop stars and his records come with the sanction of the New York art scene.

When the mainstream media took Antony to heart two years ago, it didn't feel quite right. It wasn't just Antony's injured vibrato that made him a star, nor that “Lou Reed thinks he’s cool” (as the Sydney Morning Herald felt it necessary to remind us). It was his penchant for drag and his blurred gender – could he be, possibly?, maybe! a transgender male – that proved alluring for journalists. It seemed as if writers had found Bowie all over again and were recycling their gender-bending stories like so many glass bottles and glam rockers.

At the time, I was so sick of the hype I almost threw I Am A Bird Now in the bin. It’s only recently I've listened to it again. I still don't think it’s as brilliant as most people claimed – the singer's exaggerated naivety pisses me off on at least every second track – but there are a few moments that are truly special. The best is 'Fistfull Of Love', a big-sounding track filled with horns and a momentum that makes you want to sing along in some warbled, half-made-up language. Antony lets his mutant voice run wild, and it gives you that feeling of hearing something totally new for the first time.