Recap Antony And The Johnsons at Pabst Theater

For 11 years Antony Hegarty, the gender-bending leader of Antony And The Johnsons, has used his haunting vibrato to transcend the gap between bliss and pain, and a diverse audience grabbed their hankies as they transcended the chasm with him Friday night at the Pabst Theater.

The crowd roared as the band took the dimly lit stage and opened with the driving chamber pop of “Where Is My Power.” Parker Kindred’s tasteful drum work clasped tightly into Jeff Langston 's bass groove during the playfully masochistic “Fistful of Love” before Kindred pulled back with brushes during the hushed exploration of “Twilight.” The brilliant string section of cellist Julia Kent and violinists Maxim Moston and Rob Moose moved its way through swelling arrangements, conversational melodies, and atonal shrieks. The Johnsons impressively captured the mood of each song, whether it was a dirty saxophone solo from multi-instrumentalist Doug Wiselman during the unusually danceable “Shake That Devil,” or the metaphorically dissonant drone of the string section lingering over “Another World” as Hegarty pleaded, “I need another world / this one’s nearly gone.”  

The set pulled from the band’s three-album discography, covering the better part of the new The Crying Light and even squeezing out a well executed, if hilariously dramatic, cover of Beyonce’s “Crazy In Love.” During “Epilepsy Is Dancing,” a waltz-like epic where each instrument seems to represent a character in a story, Hegarty’s shimmering voice effectively turned the song into a timeless-sounding tour de force. The Johnsons closed their lengthy set with the theatrically painful “Cripple And The Starfish” and a haunting rendition of “Hope There’s Someone.”  At the end the band was met with a thunderous standing ovation—and lots of audible “whoas!”—as they took a bow.

The show kicked off with a rather insular set from singer-guitarist Matteah Baim. So insular, in fact, that the brooding songstress never actually bothered to introduce herself. Baim opened with a reworked version of “Nighttime And Morning” from Desert Doughnuts, an album she released in 2006 with Sierra Casady of CocoRosie under the moniker of Metallic Falcons. Baim’s songs seemed to bleed together as she wove into her lush guitar loops with a Nico-lite baritone. The brief set consisted of songs from her upcoming album Laughing Boy (due in March), 2007’s Death Of The Sun, and covers of Jimi Hendrix’s “Everybody’s Wising” and Leonard Cohen’s “I’ve Been.” After set closer “Blind Man’s Hands”, Baim quickly said goodnight and fled the stage like a wanted criminal.