Pop, finally

OK, after a few days of classical stuff to which most of you are politely indifferent, we hit a seam of pop. Sort of.

Today's LP (sorry, kids, that's an ancient reference to vinyl records, which I still buy) is Antony and the Johnsons' I Am A Bird Now. I bought it, I must confess, because it was cheap and I was mildly curious. To me, it sounds like a less interesting version of Stephin Merritt's stuff (Magnetic Fields, Future Bible Heroes etc.) and very like the (to me) narcissism of Rufus Wainwright and his ilk (Wainwright and Devandra Banhart, court jester for the soi-disant American avant-garde, both appear on this album). I do like it, and sometimes catch something deeply emotional, but at other times I want to shake him and confiscate his Kate Bush records until he's grown-up enough to spot the difference between posturing and really feeling. I'd like this record a hell of a lot more if I didn't get the sense that he's (I think we can forget about 'and the Johnsons') conscious of making Something Very Important for the broadsheet critics.

Ben would no doubt say that he's too white and needs to have sex with someone, and he's not far wrong. Though Ben will also point out that I can't really critique Antony and the Johnsons for self-pity when I'm never more than ten minutes away from listening to The Field Mice. He's not wrong there either.

Gosh, that was patronising, wasn't it? He's a grown man and I know absolutely nothing about his life and where his songs came from. But then again - you release a record, you're inviting us to project our interpretations onto your work.