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ANTONY & THE JOHNSONS + COCOROSIE
The new face of punk rock?

Score one for bohemia. The Paradise brought in some chairs, and the freaks, geeks, and fashionable antiques packed the place for a "seated event" with CocoRosie and Antony and the Johnsons a week ago last Wednesday. Both of these acts — CocoRosie with their itchy, twinkly folk/hip-hop mash-up, Antony with his transgendered chamber music — are prime purveyors of the new quaintness, the exotic, private sensibility that currently seems to be mounting the most effective resistance against the mainstream. Preciousness: the new punk rock!

CocoRosie are the Casady sisters, Sierra and Bianca, long-limbed and fluent, twanging dulcimers, trilling opera, rolling through smoky sub-raps and bag-lady mutterings, wearing strange outfits, doing as they will in a context invented entirely by themselves. But are they any good? At times on Wednesday, as the clucks and grunts of human beatbox Spleen (a French rapper) penetrated the smog of toy-trumpet calls, "found sounds," etc., and the whole thing swelled toward some sort of haphazard orchestral beauty, it felt wonderful — invincibly naive, like a Children’s Crusade. Then it was a mess. Then it was wonderful again. And so on. Art films rolled behind them: a nice big horse at a fence, some masked gyrations in what looked like a room in Lower Allston. . . . A little of this goes a long way.

And what of Antony? The great Mercury Prize–winning she-man, melting into his piano keys, has become a living metaphor, a roly-poly, pigtailed locus for the war between flesh and spirit, man and woman, earth and the divine. He’s a big fella, wearing clogs, and he sings in a shivering, hormonal Nina Simone voice about growing up to be a beautiful lady ("Man Is the Baby," "For Today I Am a Boy"). It’s extremely affecting. There’s a trembling delicacy to the whole Antony project, as if someone, somewhere, might suddenly burst into tears. The backing of his Johnsons (strings, guitars) was discreet, supportive, tasteful — the cellist with lowered head, the bassist nursing somber vibrations from his instrument. But just when it was all getting a bit too exquisite, they pulled out a stunning cover of Leonard Cohen’s "The Guests," more disciplined in its misery, and of sturdier construction, than Antony’s own rather vaporous songs. "Those who dance, begin to dance/Those who weep begin/Those who earnestly are lost/Are lost and lost again. . . ." Gloomy Len took Antony to another level.

Antony himself is a charmer. "I’ve been thinking about Shania," he told us confidentially. "She’s a whore!" yelled someone. A flicker of pain crossed Antony’s face: the world had bruised him again. "Oh, no," he insisted. "She’s beautiful!" Which seemed to sum up the whole thing.

BY JAMES PARKER

Issue Date: October 7 - 13, 2005
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