Album Review: Perfume Genius- Too Bright

Because I am good at, like, letting go of things and not holding on to bad memories, I’ve spent the last two and a half years having a connection to Perfume Genius that has made me hesitant, if not afraid, to listen.

I somehow missed the boat on the first PG album, Learning, but was quite taken with the follow up, 2012’s Put Your Back N 2 It, specifically with the atmospheric and haunting first single, “All Waters,” then the bombastic and brief desperation of “Hood.”

Put Your Back N 2 It came out in February of 2012, and it was one of those albums that both my wife and I really liked, so we played it a lot in the house. We made plans to go see Perfume Genius—really just one guy, Mike Hadreas—at the Cedar Cultural Center, in April.

Our first companion rabbit, Dennis Hopper The Rabbit, passed away on April 3^rd, 2012. The concert we were going to was, like, a week later. We had originally thought about not going, but decided in our haste that we should, and that we should try to have fun. It was weird going out and not having to worry about being out late at night because he was at home alone, or having to hire a sitter to watch him while we were gone.

Also, despite his talent, Hadreas isn’t exactly a “feel good” songwriter. And going to see someone perform such, at times, heartbreaking songs in concert, was maybe, in retrospect, a bad idea.

So it’s this kind of fractured and sad personal association from a specific period of time that has kept me from listening to Perfume Genius in the interim, leading up to the release of Hadreas’ third effort with the project, Too Bright.

The announcement of Too Bright arrived earlier in the summer, coinciding with the release of the album’s first single, “Queen”—a visceral statement on the homophobia Hadreas still witnesses: “No family is safe when I sashay,” he sang on the song, backed by wonky and scuzzy synths, pitch shifted backing vocals, and hard hitting percussion.

The initial impression was that “Queen” was to serve as some kind of thesis statement for the new album, or at least as a warning of a slightly new (and larger) sound for the project, and that it would be a “fully realized” vision of what Hadreas did on a limited budget with both his home recorded Learning, and the cleaned up lo-fi aesthetic of Put Your Back N 2 It. Too Bright, however diverse and larger in scale when compared to the Perfume Genius canon thus far, is not some kind of grand, cohesive statement. What it is, instead, is a claustrophobic, weighty series of songs that indicate Hadreas has grown incredibly restless with the reserved sound he cultivated in the past, and this is his first attempt to really break free from that.

It’s a short album—like all Perfume Genius records are, actually—11 songs coming in at a half hour. And it isn’t without the tender and fragile piano soliloquies: opening with the somewhat self-aware “I Decline,” then later, it’s the elegant “Don’t Let Them In,” coming as a bit of a reprieve after the sheer menace lurking in the track before it, “My Body.”

I hesitate to call the record unfocused, but at the same time, there is certainly a lot going on here, making an incredibly complicated listen. Hadreas obviously doesn’t give a shit though about being listener friendly, stating in a recent New York Times profile that he was encouraged to make a less difficult record that would be accessible to a wider audience. He declined to name who, exactly, told him this, and by the time you reach the track, “I’m a Mother,” there should be no question that he neglected to take a casual listener in mind; so all the people who hear “Queen” on NPR or read the Times piece will probably shit themselves when they hear a song like that. “I’m a Mother” is seriously like nothing I have ever heard before—Hadreas’ vocals are shifted down to a monstrous, sinister whisper, and over a throbbing synth drone, he proceeds to let his voice crack over and over again. This is the kind of track that someone like David Lynch would probably listen to while doing some kind of mundane chore like cleaning the living room. Me, on the other hand, I can’t shake the awful sense of dread it creates as it pulses through my headphones.

He follows this, though, with the title track, which ends up being another sparse, desperate, and emotionally draining meditation on the piano, then closes up the album (somewhat abruptly) with the soulful “All Along.”

As Perfume Genius, Hadreas has never written songs that were very “warm” sounding, or inviting to a listener. Sure there were catchy pop moments (see “Hood”) but overall, there is always been dense layers of murk and very raw vignettes of the human condition to work through. However, on Too Bright, the lo-fi murk has been replaced with a cleaned up and larger sound—but that doesn’t make it any easier to a casual listener, or even more palatable to someone who considers themselves a fan. Even on the songs that have a sliver of accessibility—the new wave soul of “Fool” eventually descends into wordless howling, and the upward momentum of the song comes to a screeching halt.

As a whole, the record seems to go out of its way to keep the listener at a distance, making for a challenging experience.

But is it worth the work?

That’s what I am still grappling with here. I want to like Too Bright, and I don’t dislike it. I would never say that a record as deliberately reserved as Put Your Back N 2 It was “immediate” sounding, but Too Bright is anything but. But it’s also not inessential. It’s a record that shows Mike Hadreas, as a performer, has bigger ideas than just home recordings and somber as fuck piano ballads. It’s a midpoint kind of record, showing where he’s come from and where he’s going, but the juxtaposition between the two sounds makes for a frustrating, though fascinating, listen. 

Too Bright is out now via Matador Records.