There are many kinds of music, some are pretty low on my scale, others are breaking the scale, there are some music to-do-your-homework-with, at the lowest level of the scale, and there are some music that grab you by the throat, make you drop everything you are holding and make you listen. ‘I need you to listen’ is the last line that Mike Hadreas aka Perfume Genius sings on his new album ‘Too Bright’, and boy did I listen!
I knew very little about him and his music, but the beauty and poignancy of ‘Too Bright’ took me by surprise. The album is filled with brief songs transcribing an impressive range of raw emotions with gorgeous piano melodies, melancholic strings, experimental synths, electronic violence, piercing screams, noisy beats and Hadreas’ fierce and touching vocals. Even though the album is relatively short, there’s a lot to cover, and I could not keep up with it at first, but I just knew that these lumps in my throat at the first listening were real and a rare experience which transformed me at each listening.
But, beyond the emotion, the gorgeous melodies and the blissful musical moments, should I say that this is a very aggressive album? The visceral and unfiltered lyrics (and videos accompanying the songs) either display an unapologetic and aggressive gay sexuality,… ‘Skin sewn on sheets/Case in the barracks/For an ass to break and harness/Into the fold/Marry/No family is safe/When I sashay’, sings Hadreas in the wonderfully thunderous, empowering and menacing ‘Queen’,… or a self-disgust difficult to bear, ‘I wear my body like a rotted peach/You can have it if you handle the stink’, he yells during the darkest and most panicking part of ‘My Body’. There is an appetite for mixing gorgeous melodies with ugly thoughts, a provocative taste for a sort of dirty glamour, and it is fascinating.
‘It’s about demanding respect instead of constantly seeking acceptance from everyone else. It’s about taking it, instead of waiting for it’, Hadreas explained in an interview. There’s no doubt what the album is about and this may be its most amazing side: although I don’t share a painful life experience with Hadreas – adolescent, he was beaten and bullied for being gay – the songs and music touched me deeply: forget about gayness and homophobia, there is something immensely personal but also very universal in these sad and daring songs, which often wraps their pop sensibility under a semi-religious glow. Just listen to ‘Fool’, the song starts with an almost upbeat synth and clapping fingers then breaks in the middle into a church-like hymn with this operatic shriek that will pierce the darkest and brightest parts of your soul… It is as if Hadreas had written secular hymns for the human condition.
What you will notice first is the solemnity and the slow pace of many of the songs, spacing out and contrasting with the aggressiveness and anger of other tracks… it’s an album with many silences, but every song sounds different, bringing ache and sadness but also brightness and blissful moments like the lush melody at minute one of ‘No Good’, soon followed by an abandon in a cascade of piano notes, or the liquid morphine pouring in your ears right in the middle of ‘Don’t Let Them in’. There is absolutely nothing predictable in this album, nothing conventional, everything escapes any conformity and the emotions are as diverse as the sound palette, they cry and rage from peace to wartime, from sadness and pain to fear and panic, but also to boldness and fierceness.
‘Grid’ is an aggressive piece with stabbing synths, tribal chants and screams transpiring anger and distress, while the hypnotic synth of ‘Longpig’ reminded me a bit of something from the last Cat Power’s album. It’s probably impossible to describe the intensity and cosmic depth of ‘I’m A Mother’, the pain is palpable and the inaudible and hurting vocals sound as if they were sung in pure agony, or as if Klaus Nomi was singing this poignant Purcell song from a distant star, while sinking under columns of water.
The title track has hope in polyphonic waves but stays quite miserable while ‘All Along’ brings the most defiant message of the album, ‘A heart long desperate/For something I had all along/I don’t need your love/ I don’t need you to understand/I need you to listen’. Hadreas’ underlying rage has finally materialized through these cathartic songs, and he is fiercely reclaiming his own identity and bravely holding it high to the world, like a too-bright threat at everyone’s face.
‘Too Bright’ is Perfume Genius’ third album, it was co-produced by Portishead’s Adrian Utley, and is released via Matador Records on September 23rd.
