One listen to The Crying Light suggests that Hagerty's flirtations with electro sounds were just that. If anything, he and his chamber pop band have retreated even further from the trappings of modern pop music. Their new album seems to take place in a Victorian era parlor, as dawn's first blush seeps in softly through lace curtains. Not that the music here is preciously old-fashioned. Rather, Antony's classically informed back-of-the-palate delivery and the Johnsons' string playing – sparingly used, yet lushly warm – so effectively conjure an older time that it's easy to place their music in a pre-Industrial setting.

The lyrical themes coursing throughout The Crying Light also seem not rooted in the present. Darkness, light, forgiveness, death, redemption - these subjects call back to the Shakespearian, Romantic or maybe even early 20th century times. Hagerty's language is often old-fashioned, as well. On the gorgeous and mournful opener, "Her Eyes Are Underneath the Ground," Antony sings, "In the garden with my mother I stole a flower" and "I felt you calling to me in the gloom." This stuff is worlds away from the realm of ringtones and backstabbing girlfriends that occupies so much of modern pop verbiage. Not that Antony and the Johnsons could be mistaken for a Top 40 act. Still, Hagerty's words are far removed from the primary concerns of even contemporary alt and indie scribes: alienation, global warming, Orwellian governments. Instead, in "One Dove," Antony finds salvation through his title creature when, "In starlight you came from the other side / To offer me mercy." These are lines that surely have more in common with Keats and Dickinson than Bono and Yorke.

So, too, with "Daylight and the Sun," in which "Daylight kisses everything / She can see." Over six minutes long, the track provides the album's emotional climax. At the song's center, Hagerty's piano crescendos, his vocals soar in full vibrato, violins reach higher and higher, and timpani drums roll like far-off thunder. Here, Antony and the Johnsons tap most effectively into Nina Simone's well of melancholic, gospel-derived, tastefully orchestrated, piano balladeer song forms. Few acts can pull this off, and the group's execution on "Daylight and the Sun" is really what the word sublime is all about.

However, its follow-up number, "Aeon," finds electric guitar coming to the fore for the first time on The Crying Light. By track eight, this feels like an anachronistic blunder in the period piece with which we've become absorbed, like spotting a Walkman in Howard's End. It's not a bad track, in and of itself, but it is out of place. From there, the album's last two songs – "Dust and Water" and "Everglade" – pass by a bit too meekly. They aren't exactly filler, but the two preceding tunes have wielded so much emotional weight, that the sobriety of these final cuts makes for a limp ending to an otherwise powerful release.

So, the strength of The Crying Light resides in its first seven songs. To that point, the album is every bit as engrossing as I Am a Bird Now. If Antony and the Johnsons had maintained the consistent feel and creative surge of its opening and middle, we would have had another classic on our hands.

Essential Tracks: "Her Eyes Are Underneath the Ground," "One Dove," "Daylight and the Sun"