Revisit of the Week: Anohni and The Johnsons - Crying Light (2009)
Like many others, I discovered Anohni and The Johnsons through 2004's phenomenal I Am a Bird Now. You know when you sometimes hear a song that simply arrests you in your place and completely overwhelms you? That was "Hope There's Someone", and a chance purchase of the album itself turned out to be one of those teenage Flint whim shots that paid unexpected dividends - hearing an album so unashamedly queer (though in a very somber manner) proved to be quite important when I soul-searched the ins and outs of my own sexuality. The album's success briefly made Anohni a real hot topic who'd end up featuring all over the place over the next couple of years, and it took much longer than that until her posse found the time to release a follow-up album. Long enough that I ended up completely falling off the wagon despite my love for I Am a Bird Now (it's not like I ever went back to the self-titled debut either, no matter how many times I glimpsed at it on my then-go-to online record shop). It took me until 2023's fabulous comeback album My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross to think that maybe I really, really should fill the gaps and actually check out the albums in-between. So, the big follow-up album Crying Light has only been in my collection for a couple of years even though I remember the polite buzz around its release. No memory lane waxing here about it!
This Revisit of the "Week" post comes about two weeks after the last one, and partly that's because of life and its many frustrations, partly because I had a veritable backlog of new purchases to dig into and I wanted to spend time with those, and equally in part because I wanted to spend a bit more time with Crying Light. This is not an album that demands to steal your attention, and instead it can quite easily disappear into the background. It's not like I Am a Bird Now was exactly a fireworks display either, but it bore the emotional weight of a tearjerking cinderblock and you could not just stand by and let it slip past. Crying Light is a lot more polite about it all. Anohni's heavenly voice is still loaded with choked-up emotion in every single howling note, but the arrangements are even more minimalist and somber in their chamber pop melancholy. Above all, they are soft: even at its most starkly vulnerable moments of escalation the notes barely rise above water.
I haven't spent as much time Crying Light as I perhaps should have in the past, which is another reason why I have this Revisit of the Week project to begin with - and it was also why I wanted to take a bit longer with this "cycle". And after this period... I still find it difficult to grab onto this. Crying Light is, to re-use a word, perhaps a bit too polite. I Am a Bird Now was elegant but also raw, almost rebellious in its own well-mannered way - Crying Light on the other hand sounds like the five years spent in public spotlight, in increasingly more respectable music venues and more acclaimed stage appearances where the tattered drag glam has been replaced with designer gowns. It just doesn't keep me in its hold; it feels gossamer thin, all gorgeous and evocative on the surface but emotionally distant rather than speaking from the heart. A performance of what you would expect from Anohni & The Johnsons. The sparseness of the album also backfires as it coming off as very one note and one mood throughout, each song bleeding into one another; maybe no surprise that I keep coming back to the lively waltz "Kiss My Name" and the electrified "Aeon" above all, as they're the ones that most shake up the album from its trappings and bring some much needed colour into its palette.
I don't know. It's all very lovely, aesthetically. But it's like a friendly dinner party version of I Am a Bird Now and I'm wanting a bit more out of it.
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