an orgy of strapping field hands and dirty church girls

I love Antony and the Johnsons. Swooning and swooning and relentlessly swooning against the unending brutal tide of life and then, in defiance to the sea's righteous fury, he stands resolute and marches into the vast murky depths. Whether to tame the sea like Emperor Xerxes or to drown in it like Vigrinia Woolf, pockets laden with stones - it's unclear of his motive. But he goes there. This new EP, Another World, doesn't hit me quite as hard as I Am A Bird has been lately, but that is like saying this electric eel wrapped too tight around my neck is no thunderbolt. "Shake that Devil" is a stylistic triumph for even him, rolling from solemn balladry to snake-handling gospel with just the right amount of icy distance.

It's not quite the cognitive leap to get from Antony's tear-stained cabaret-in-the-mirror to Charlie Haden's polite gathering Family & Friends: Rambling Boy as I thought it would be. I think they both have restraint as their finest weapon: Haden's bass has been one of foundation elements of stretching jazz's envelope since his involvement with Ornette Coleman and debut with the Liberation Music Orchestra in 1969 - but the content of his correspondence depends on not tearing the envelope, instead by opneing it where the flaps are, gently perfuming it like a love letter. Here he grounds a congenial cookout with country stars like Vince Gill and Roseanne Cash. Elvis Costello continues his run of never missing a party to crash and there is a heavy-yet-delcate Katrina meditation with Pat Metheny so diaphonous it borders on being a fog. Jack Black is on it even - he should sing more and act less in dumb movies, its a place where his overbearing demaonor is an asset rather than a liability.

The whole thing's a little hokey, frankly, but in the right way. It would be the soundtrack to the greatest episode of Prairie Home Companion ever. It's like Cracker Barrel meets Pottery Barn. If he could join forces with the hot newgrass couple Allison Krauss and Robert Plant, it might open a boho cornpone vortex bringing on the homespun Armageddon, Paul Harvey flying overhead in a Radio Flyer wagon pulled by a flock of bald eagles, hands suddenly plunging up from the earth bearing steaming baskets of cornbread. There would ensue an orgy of strapping field hands and dirty church girls, lustily tilling a New America out of the scorched earth we left them. Or something like that. It's a good record.

As for Brightblack Morning Light, it's hard to say what this sounds like, because it barely exists. Their shtick is bongwater soul-funk smothered in onions and chicken grease until it forms a dark brown gravy that only serves to transform anything on which it is poured into more of itself. Mind you, I kinda like that about them - the gravy is a little burnt, a hint of earthy charcoal, mineral indigestibility to it that adds considerable conceptual weight to the offerings from Haden's church picnic. Their last record was nothing but delicate throb all the way through - great music to drowsily clean a room to - but the haze here is more complicated, like stumbling around a room in the dark, voices half-heard whispering from the shadows. This is maybe the sound Eve heard, snakes come-hithering over the lazy cicada buzz of the garden. Or maybe its the sound of one stoner falling in the woods with no one to hear him. Hard to say.