Photos and review by ALYSON CAMUS
– HOLLYWOOD – There are some albums you listen to a few times after their release, and there are some albums that stay with you forever. I still consider Perfume Genius’s breakthrough album, Too Bright as one of the latest since I still listen to it with the same intact emotion. The songs still do their magic, all delivered with a raw and visceral poignancy that you very rarely encounter in today’s music industry.
The record is already 10 years old and Mike Hadreas, aka Perfume Genius, had planned just a handful of anniversary shows in intimate places, including two at the Masonic Lodge at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Both nights immediately sold out, but I got the chance to get a ticket for Thursday night.
Perfume Genius writes music that unexpectedly grabs you, gives you lumps in the throat, chills in the spine, and even transforms you, while his fascinating performances always mix an incredible vulnerability with a predatory attitude, and these shows were not to be missed.
Julianna Barwick, a Los Angeles-based composer, vocalist, and producer, opened the night with her original and reflective compositions rooted in layers of her voice. Standing in front of an electronic table, she was building tracks with a cathedral effect as she was recording loops of her vocals for the most amazing polyphonic result.
It was both throbbing and eerie, celestial music in the middle of a cemetery, slowly sprawling in the beautiful venue, as she was barely stopping between the tracks that were all intertwined. With piano lines and soaring vocals, she gave a reflective performance for an audience who listened to the entire show in a religious silence.
As expected, Hadreas and his band played the entire Too Bright album, plus a few other songs filling the night with pure beauty. The poignancy of the music triggered strong emotions among the audience, and I even saw a man in tears during a few songs. Wearing a glittering outfit for the occasion, he was enjoying every second of the show, while Perfume Genius, in a glorious golden shirt, below a darker gold jacket he didn’t keep for very long, looked a bit nervous at the beginning but told us later that he was having a great time.
As he delivered his songs with a powerful theatricality, he alternatively moved from the front stage position to a more remote place, behind his keyboard. Too Bright is effectively filled with gorgeous piano melodies but also melancholic strings, experimental synths, electronic violence, piercing screams, noisy beats, and everything was there during this beautiful night. His performance fully translated the album’s impressive range of raw emotions, while his fierce and touching vocals pierced everyone’s heart. He is one of these rare artists who can effortlessly mix vulnerability with fierceness, fragility with boldness, and even aggressiveness, incarnating a made-up character able to sound triumphant at the bottom of human despair.
“No family is safe/When I sashay’, Hadreas sang in the wonderfully thunderous, empowering, and menacing “Queen,” the second song of the album. He performed this satirical and triumphant anthem in all its glory and abandon, and he even did the beloved song a second time during the encore, drawing the pile of tulle that was occupying one side of the stage, wrapping and drowning himself in it, then falling on a chair at the center of the stage. It may have been the most dramatic moment of the show, art pop at its best, Perfume Genius at the top of his art.
He cultivated this romantic vision throughout the entire album while the solemnity of some slow songs played in full contrast with the aggressiveness and anger of other tracks. It’s not an exaggeration to say that every song of “Too Bright” sounds different, and there is absolutely nothing predictable, nothing conventional in them. They cry and rage from peace to wartime, from sadness to pain, fear, and fierceness.
The upbeat synth and clapping fingers of “Fool” broke into a church-like hymn with Hadreas’s operatic and cathartic shriek piercing the darkest and brightest parts of everyone’s soul. Mixing ache with brightness and blissful moments, the lush melody of “No Good” – a song they had never played live before as he told us – was soon followed by an abandon of cascading piano notes. The yelling during “My Body,” accentuated the panic coming from an appetite for mixing gorgeous melodies with ugly thoughts while liquid morphine poured into our ears right in the middle of “Don’t Let Them In.”
His great band gave a sonic relief to the songs with glorious guitar lines and powerful drumming while Hadreas was sometimes tapping the floor with his shoes. The truly unique “Grid” soared with stabbing synths, cymbals, pounding drums, tribal chants, and screams transpiring anger and distress, while Mike Hadreas performed “I’m A Mother,” sitting on a chair with barely audible vocals but transpiring hurt and slow agony, coming in full contrast with the polyphonic sonic waves of the next song, the title track, “Too Bright.”
“This is the last song on the album,” he told us before the defiant “All Along.” It is indeed a relatively short album that burned too bright too fast, but the performance was not over as he continued with a Leonard Cohen cover “Bird on the Wire,” and a few of his own: the funky poppy “On the Floor” (which starts like a Stevie Wonder song) from his 2020 album Set My Heart on Fire Immediately was followed by the lovely doo-wop-y “Story of Love,” and the transcendantal “My Place” – two of the three bonus tracks featured on a special vinyl version of “Too Bright” celebrating the 10th anniversary of the album. The angular guitars and uplifting ascension of “Slip Away,” off his 2017 album “No Shape,” ended the show before an encore of “Queen.”
The intensity of a Perfume Genius’s performance is hard to describe because of his underlying rage materialized through cathartic songs. The emotion he drains from his cathartic music always releases a sort of disoriented euphoria, a threat thrown at everyone’s face, while the songs sound like secular hymns written for the human condition.
There’s no doubt what Too Bright is about, but this may be the most amazing part of Perfume Genius’s genius: forget about gayness and homophobia, there is something very personal but also immensely universal in these sad and daring songs, which wraps their pop sensibility under a semi-religious glow. And his performance on Thursday night was another beautiful demonstration of their fascinating empowerment.
Listen to Perfume Genius:
