Perfume Genius - Ugly Season (Vinyl)

Description

As Perfume Genius, Mike Hadreas straddles the line between storyteller and composer. His music suggests narrative threads—an abusive grandfather, a sick body, a hateful world—that he dissolves into impressionistic lyrics and orchestral soundscapes. Hadreas’ restless style keeps him at the vanguard of pop where a twinkle of piano might sound as queer as an intimate disclosure. Shapeshifting becomes its own act of defiance, a shirking of the simplified labels of the straight world.On his latest album, the eerie and gorgeous Ugly Season, the 40-year-old makes a dramatic yet natural shift. Decentering his angelic voice and direct lyrics, Ugly Season favors the experiments that always lurked on the outskirts of his songs. A master of tone-setting opening lines, Hadreas starts the album with a statement of purpose. “No pattern,” he deadpans, under treatments so heavy they smother his words. Ugly Season incorporates chimes, Mellotron, celeste, guitarrón, reggae pulses, and song structures loose enough that they seem to swell operatically, or, in the case of the thrilling “Eye in the Wall,” stretch into an extended disco mix. A pop-star-turned-composer’s record akin to Kid A and Low, Ugly Season nonetheless feels more like an act of generosity than a wrench thrown in expectations. The album’s expansive spirit recalls a long line of artists who rejected the classical establishment in order to show composition’s potential to be ecstatic, healing, modern, and queer—luminaries such as Julius Eastman, Arthur Russell, Beverly Glenn-Copeland, and Merce Cunningham. (Daniel Fesenthal)