Antony & the Johnsons: Another World EP

Antony Hegarty's music, performed under the name Antony & The Johnsons, is a lesson in the performativity of gender, operatic and self-consciously flamboyant. It's the type of music that could give birth to a Judith Butler lecture or be used as a punishment for a group of frat boys who throw around the word "gay" as an epithet. The scenario: lock them all in a room, play "Cripple and the Starfish" for a couple of hours and-the punch line-see if they don't come out singing "I'll grow back like a starfish" in perfect falsetto synchronization.

"Cripple and the Starfish" is from Antony's self-titled debut, but on his new EP, Another World, the songs inhabit that same strange, beautiful place. By the time you get to the closer, "Hope Mountain," you're in a world where epithets have no place. On the plaintive opening track, "Another World" he sings, "I need another place/will there be peace/I need another world/this one's nearly gone," simultaneously mourning the existence and death of this world. It's a familiar refrain for Antony; transgression, transformation and transmigration are themes he returns to again and again.

My first appreciation, but not my first listen, to Antony was gained watching him perform Leonard Cohen's "If It Be Your Will" in the tribute movie Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man. Watching Antony perform is like catching a being in metamorphosis. At first, he is uncomfortable in his body, shaking with no regard for the beat of the music, eyes closed. The microphone seems foreign in his hand, as if he's unsure what to do with it. But then, he begins to sing. To say Antony's voice is soaring is an understatement; every time you think the pitch, the emotion, the sound have plateaued, he raises it another notch until finally, you forget all about the strange man twitching on stage. You're left with the tower of song.

Antony's music is idiosyncratic and not for everyone, as Another World bears out. It's not even for me at all times. Antony exists in a space for me that includes artists such as Current 93, Baby Dee and Xiu Xiu: dramatic, inaccessible to most and infinitely pleasurable once you've learned to appreciate it. The last track on the new EP, "Hope Mountain," might be depressing to some, the type of song to skip on an iPod set on shuffle. For me, having heard it, I can't imagine a world, or an iPod, that exists without it.

It's not that I listen to music to be depressed, far from it. I pity the sad emo kids. It's that Antony, with "Hope Mountain," and throughout Another World, has hit on something that most people don't even bother trying to express in music: the possibility of a world in which individuals, sounds and songs are appreciated for their qualities, not their classifications.

Make no mistake: Another World is strange, depressing and flamboyant. But it's also the most beautiful thing you'll hear until Antony's new full-length, The Crying Light, comes out in January.