Perfume Genius - No Shape

Boldness and self-acceptance on genrehopping fourth.

- Alex Macpherson

ANXIETY has always pervaded the work of Seattle singer-songwriter Mike Hadreas. “Your heart will break whatever you do,” he trembled on 2010’s “you Won’t B Here”, while the delicate vignettes of his early career involved suicides, disappearances and hints of abuse. in documenting the demons of queer adolescence and existence, Hadreas’ oblique poetry also positioned him in the lineage of so-called “confessional” artists such as tori Amos and Fiona Apple, whose intensity in mining emotional wounds simultaneously resonated and discomfited. 

The fear hasn’t entirely gone away on No Shape, his fourth LP as Perfume Genius. Midway through its running time, “Choir” finds him confessing, “I can’t dream/ Something keeps me locked and bodied,” in a theatrical, strangulated whisper as though his words are being dragged out of the music. But that music is also indicative of the increasing boldness of Hadreas’ work. Lofty strings and elegiac chorales spiral and circle around him, painting the religious dimension of his existential dread in pure high-church melodrama. the artist who confined himself to timorous, spare piano accompaniments on his first two albums, 2010’s Learning and 2012’s Put Your Back N 2 It, is long gone – but if 2014’s Too Bright marked Hadreas’ first moves into fleshing out his songs with full-blooded arrangements, there’s been no resting on any laurels since.