Antony & the Johnsons: "The Crying Light" (Secretly Canadian, 2009)

The Crying Light is Antony and the Johnsons' third studio album and the follow-up to the band's widely-acclaimed second LP, I Am a Bird Now.[1][2] The album was released on January 19, 2009, and preceded by lead single, "Another World", released through Secretly Canadian on October 7, 2008. The Crying Light features orchestrated string arrangements by Antony and Nico Muhly.[3]
The album's cover artwork features a 1977 photograph of famed butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno, by Naoya Ikegami. Antony said of the image: "The Crying Light is dedicated to the great dancer Kazuo Ohno. In performance I watched him cast a circle of light upon the stage, and step into that circle, and reveal the dreams and reveries of his heart. He seemed to dance in the eye of something mysterious and creative; with every gesture he embodied the child and the feminine divine. He's kind of like my art parent."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crying_Light

The latest album from this celebrated avant-soul crooner and his chamber-folk backing band examines humanity's increasingly complicated relationship with Planet Earth — which seems something of an inside joke when you consider that the word used perhaps most often to describe Antony's voice is "otherworldly."
There's precious little humor to be found elsewhere on The Crying Light; like its predecessors (which include 2005's Mercury Music Prize–winning I Am a Bird Now), this is sober, serious stuff about people dying and rivers drying up and what it would feel like never to see snow again. http://thephoenix.com/Boston/Music/75338-CRYING-LIGHT/