ANTONY Hegarty is a mass of insoluble contradictions. After all, how many more six-foot plus, hefty transgender, British-born New Yorkers who sing with a gloomy vibrato can you think of?

Antony And The Johnsons came to general attention after winning the Mercury Music Prize in 2005 for I Am A Bird Now. And what an astonishing, strange album that was – a beautiful, doom-laced warble about confused sexuality that was usually affecting and affectingly unusual.

Now the thing about Hegarty is, how much more can a person take – how many more minutes of your life do you want to spend listening to this macabre, dramatic form of purest musical misery?

Well, about about 37 minutes as it happens, because The Crying Light is another thing of strange beauty. The format is similar to I Am A Bird Now, as are too many of the songs. My, Hegarty does like to approach us from the doom-laden end of the piano keyboard, whose deep notes provide much of his personal soundtrack.

This is most evident on Another World, the most elemental song on this album about Mother Nature and her disasters. This hymn for a dying world sounds miserable, which it is, yet is strangely joyous too – and shows Hegarty moving from the personal to the general.

Although the deepest pessimism is what gets him going, a change of mood suits Hegarty. So it is that the oddly named Epilepsy Is Dancing has a lightness not suggested by its subject material, while the stand-out Aeon thrillingly mixes southern soul and Steve Cropper’s guitar with Hegarty’s suddenly playful vocal. More light and less crying might be nice next time, but this is still a work of wonder.