The first line on Perfume Genius' third album, Too Bright, is a basic observation, one we've heard a million times in songs: "I can see for miles." Mike Hadreas, the Seattle songwriter behind the project, sings it over a spare piano, something that won't surprise people familiar with his music. The sentiment, though, is a bit unexpected: Hadreas has made a habit of writing powerful, intimate, and sometimes introverted songs that look closely at his inner life, warts and all, and at the inner lives of the people around him. These words find him peering outward.
The rest of the lyric finds Hadreas acknowledging the cliché, and averting his eyes: "I can see for miles/ The same old line/ No thanks/ I decline." What he sees is an "Angel just above the grid/ Open, smiling, reaching," but he rejects it. Later he uses the line again, on the raucous "Grid", with the same decision to look away. At that point, though, "There is no angel/ Above the grid." It's been replaced by "A diamond/ Swallowed and shit/ Then swallowed again." He adds: "At least we know where it's been."
All of this is important to consider because Too Bright is, by far, Hadreas' most extroverted album to date, a record about shattering illusions, defiantly looking away when you feel like it, and boldly staring back at those who hate you. It's also about personalizing your experience, and rejecting the clichés placed on it by outsiders. As Hadreas has explained, "A lot of these songs are me trying to claim some power in situations that would typically depress or alienate or victimize me...I've seen faces of blank terror when I walk by. Sometimes from seemingly strong, macho dudes—somehow my presence confuses and ultimately scares them. There is a strange power to it that I've only recently begun to understand and embrace."
Too Bright follows 2012's excellent Put Your Back N 2 It, a quiet record that offered variations on a central sound; sonically, Hadreas pushes things much further here. He recorded Too Bright with previous collaborator Ali Chant and Portishead's Adrian Utley, who also played bass and synth. Additionally, PJ Harvey collaborator John Parish plays drums on a number of tracks that, fittingly, are reminiscent of fuzzed-out Harvey songs. There are still elemental, stripped-down moments, but the sound is generally denser and weirder. For the first time in Hadreas' career, he's giving equal time to the textures as he is with his words. That said, his vocals are more muscular, too, more clear and naked-sounding. His voice takes on a shape-shifting quality on Too Bright, sometimes warping into odd, ambient shapes; on the finger-snapping "Fool", his powerful falsetto sounds like it could fill a cathedral and then crack it in half.
"Queen" features heavy, fuzzed bass along with synthesized vocal choirs and rhythmic oomph backing the great, cocky line, "No family is safe, when I sashay." The frenetic, fucked-up "Grid", with immense banshee howls, horns, and repetitious, burly bass is reminiscent of Swans (the video, on the other hand, resembles Tom Petty's "Don't Come Around Here No More" as done by David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust persona). On "I'm a Mother", Hadreas performs muffled, creepy falsetto that sounds like Antony whispering beneath a pillow. The title track is a ballad with piano and Hadreas' crystalline voice, mixing in chiming clarinet, synth washes, and escalating ghost choirs; "Longpig" possesses a booming '80s synth line, ricocheting handclaps, and violent burts and blooms with lines about burying meat for mama. As on Put Your Back, there's a sock-hop quality to many of these songs, especially the closer "All Along", but the structure is toyed with and flayed, shifting on a dime.
The approach to writing lyrics here is more elliptical and mysterious, too. There isn't the same kind of fleshed-out narrative storytelling found on previous highlights "Mr. Peterson" or "Dark Parts". These tracks often zero in on overall textures, but this doesn't mean the lyrics aren't nakedly intimate. "I wear my body like a rotted peach/ You can have it if you handle the stink," he sings on "My Body". On "Queen", he tosses out and reinscribes gay stereotypes: "Don't you know your Queen?/ Ripped, heaving/ Flowers bloom at my feet/ Don't you know your Queen?/ Cracked, peeling/ Riddled with disease."
There are brilliant insights and images that reveal themselves over multiple listens. On "Fool", he makes a dress, lays it out on "the couch you bought," then bleeds out on that couch in one version and dances in another. He finds power in being able to hold the hand of the man he loves, no longer needing to keep secrets: "I carry their names, the secret shapes/ An aching braid around my heart/ Traced in the park, an outline I chalk." And, as he sings on the closing track, "All Along", "I don't need your love/ I don't need you to understand/ I need you to listen."
He's also shifted his look to match his new sound. In the past, Hadreas donned cozy sweaters and black hoodies; on the golden cover of Too Bright he looks buffed and polished, and in recent videos he's wearing smart suits and designer clothes with colorful splashes of makeup. He's always had a knack for the quietly devastating; there was his basic, simply shot, romantic, and playful video for Put Your Back's "Hood", with the beefy gay porn star Arpad Miklos (who committed suicide a year after the clip), and Hadreas and his mother climbing into a tree at the end of "Dark Parts", a song in part about her being molested by her grandfather. Here, he finds a way to maintain that personal feel while strutting down a board room table in high heels.
Hadreas' sexuality is obviously a huge part of his work, but he's above all a human—one who's spoken about battling addiction and sickness and sadness, and one who possesses the ability to write about it in a way that feels universal. A huge part of what makes the work so strong is the generous human spirit that bleeds into it, and Too Bright is the best example to date of the lengths he goes to confront his fears and demons. These songs feel less like songs and more like treasures, ones that fill you with power and wisdom, and as a result, Too Bright seems capable of resonating with, comforting, and moving anyone who's ever felt alienated, discriminated against, or "other-ized," regardless of sexual orientation.
