There was a sense that Antony Hegarty was at a creative crossroads on last year's Swanlights, struggling to free himself from the rueful corner he'd so beautifully painted himself into. The jaunty "Thank You For Your Love", with its stodgy horns and schmaltzy outro, was the sound of Hegarty pushing his creativity into new areas. It's possible he was self-consciously confronting the eternal struggle that many artists face-- evolve or die, avoid stagnation at any cost. In truth, Swanlights contains a rich vein of material that often equals that of his back catalog. But it followed two tightly focused records that found acres of ground to explore within a purposefully limited range. The removal of those stylistic shackles made it hard to become immersed in Swanlights in the same way as his prior conceptual tour-de-force, The Crying Light.
But 2010 also found Hegarty branching out in another, more successful way. His collaboration with Oneohtrix Point Never, on a startling piano-and-vocal reworking of the track "Returnal", provided a timely reminder of his raw talent. Stripped of the overly fussy arrangements that sometimes blighted Swanlights, it felt as if Hegarty had been freed to reach back down to that blackened spot from which he operates so effectively. The Swanlights EP offers him more chances to mine the same emotional territory. There's another OPN collaboration, with Hegarty mostly deferring to Lopatin's creative whims this time out; the standout title track from Swanlights; and a couple of new songs that may hint at future worlds for Antony and his band to get immersed in.
Isolating "Swanlights" in this way gives it an impact similar to his version of "Returnal". Both songs work most effectively when given space to breathe, unclustered from the confines of a full-length album. "Swanlights" pulls off a favorite trick of Hegarty's, as he begins in darkness and then slowly climbs toward the light. His lead vocal is intertwined with samples of his own voice, some of which are backwards-masked and set low in the mix. The drone-like backing forms a fitting counterpart to Hegarty's wistful vocal and makes a sharp contrast to the strings and piano that billow up at the halfway point. Like his most effective music, it finds its stride in that conjoining of avant impulses and more traditional torch-song fare.
"Find the Rhythm of Your Love" is a folk-tinged lament with wheezing accordion, strident violin, and a few whimsical time changes. Both that song and the following "Kissing No One" are chiefly driven by Antony running his fingers over a piano; he works in other instrumentation but never lets any of it slip out of his control as it occasionally did on Swanlights. Here, all the players feel in tune with one another.
The OPN reworking of "Swanlights" is the final track, and it's cast around great slabs of metallic noise and occasional deviations into My Bloody Valentine-style dissonance. It's the opposite of their work together on "Returnal"-- as if Lopatin has pulled in a few too many ideas that don't quite fit when he could have kept things simpler. But the awkward juxtaposition between the vocals and the instrumentation reaches an uneasy peace toward the end, when Lopatin settles into the hollowed-out machine noise that he's better known for, and Hegarty's vocals take on an otherworldly tone. This EP may not hint at the aesthetic rebirth we can expect on his next full-length, but it finds Hegarty in more comfortable territory, a natural bridge between his old and new ideas.
