When Perfume Genius released “Queen” and “Grid” as the leadoff singles for 2014’s Too Bright — which turns 10 today — Mike Hadreas’ metamorphosis into a pop star was well underway. Rock was mired in a general embarrassment about its domination by straight white dudes with guitars during pop’s post-“Blurred Lines” moral reckoning, and the indie world needed something fierce, fun, and challenging. Hadreas, a gay 30-something from Seattle who’d released two albums of painfully fragile piano ballads under a name taken from the grisly and voluptuous 2006 thriller Perfume: Story Of A Murderer, was in the position to give that to the world. Working with Portishead’s Adrian Utley to push his sound into the post-Yeezus zeitgeist of serrated minimalism, Hadreas seemed ready to complete the transition towards a more pop and extroverted mode, which is often the extra push a rising artist needs to vault to the highest echelons of indie acclaim.
Too Bright achieved everything Hadreas, Utley, and Perfume Genius’ longtime label Matador wanted it to, and his music since its release has grown bigger and more suited to the festivals he found himself playing with increasing regularity as his indie-darling status became secure. What’s remarkable today is how small and strange this album is. On the basis of the first two singles and the image Hadreas projected on the album cover — pouting, coiled with tension, a glam-rock James Cagney — it was easy to imagine an album of wall-to-wall bangers, the indie answer to Gaga’s Born This Way. But half of Too Bright is composed of piano ballads, the songs have a way of ending before you expect them to, and the overall impression is more of an abstract sound-painting of otherness than a pop record.
“Queen” came on strong with its opening line: “Don’t you know your queen?” Hadreas sang, which happens to sound exactly like “Don’t you know you’re queen?” Half a decade after pop’s rainbow-capitalist wave, it was easy to read the song at face value as a Pride anthem. Indie rock was in a quotable mood at the time, and “no family is safe when I sashay” felt tailor-made for the socials. What comes on most strongly in retrospect, though, is the song’s disgustingness: Epithets like “rank,” “ragged,” and “riddled with disease” stand in for longstanding cultural associations of gay men but also add up to a picture of an imperious and grotesque figure, in line with the album’s lyrical focus on the flesh as something to be “worn” over the blood and guts of the real human body, on its contrast of regal imagery and visceral, putrid body horror.
On the album, “Queen” is followed by “Fool,” and as soon as its bright synth stabs and theatrical finger-snaps enter we expect another anthem. Yet “Fool” quickly curdles into a rebuke of any vicarious feelings of pride the listener might feel through Hadreas and his aesthetic of brash self-assurance, and after a short ambient interlude the song re-emerges as a gruesome parody of lounge jazz, as he sings of doing a dance on the couch and playing the role of a flamboyant clown for a friend or lover. Images of Bugs Bunny as Brunnhilde slithering up and down a chair for Elmer in What’s Opera, Doc? spring to mind. He sounds sick of this charade.
There is no “pride” on Too Bright, just a pervasive feeling of being monstrous, of being seen too clearly, too brightly. The person singing these songs is convinced of his own disgustingness, comparing his body to a gutted pig and a rotted peach on “My Body,” exaggerating the insecurity most people who have sex have felt about their own fluids and stenches — exacerbated perhaps by Hadreas’ struggle with Crohn’s disease, which he’s said has caused him to “not trust [his] insides.” Few indie rock records this side of Richard Dawson’s Peasant are so at home among bodily functions and nauseating smells; over clattering drums and ghostly dancehall samples, “Grid” offers the image of “a diamond ring swallowed and shit and swallowed again.”
It’s hard now to imagine Too Bright as Hadreas’ most pop or most extroverted anything. It’s some kind of superlative in his discography, but not one of those. The trappings of inspirational queer pop are one input for this music, but so is the Suicide tradition of deconstructed rockabilly, and bluesy subtleties abound: the “maybe baby”s on “Grid,” the triplet “ah-ah”s on “Queen” that are distorted to sound like a muted trumpet or a church bell, the West Side Story finger-snaps on “Fool.” “I’m A Mother” channels Hadreas’ love of vocal impressionists like Mary Margaret O’Hara (no stranger to dysphoric ballads) and Diamanda Galás; though it’s worth wondering where Hadreas might’ve taken it if Matador hadn’t demanded he cut half its runtime, its present three-minute form helps the album maintain its mesomorphic shape (it runs only 33 minutes).
One interesting theme on Too Bright is its undercurrent of tribal kitsch. Hadreas seems to take inspiration from the idea that pre-colonial indigenous cultures were more accepting and reverent of divergent sexual and gender identities than Christianized or Islamized ones, and he yearns to join the women’s tribal utopia on “Longpig,” where men are no longer needed except as the occasional sacrifice to the mother goddess (the title is an archaic euphemism for human meat). “Queen” finds him backed by pseudo-tribal boomlays that sound like the “jungle drums” in Val Lewton’s I Walked With A Zombie, while mid-album ballad “Don’t Let Them In” makes explicit his longing for an alternate “ribbon of time” where his “dances were sacred” and his “lisp” proved he spoke for “both spirits.”
This is dangerously close to identifying with the specifically Native American two-spirit identity, not to mention lumping in this very real and resilient community with ancient pre-industrial history, and it points to the overriding flaw of Too Bright, which is that the songwriting is a little too creaky to carry the parts where the synths drop away and we’re left just with Hadreas at the piano — nearly half the record, in other words. The lyrics are terse and cryptic, and images repeat from song to song, like an “angel above the grid”; though Hadreas has said this isn’t a concept album, these commonalities might incite amateur sleuths to comb through the lyric sheets looking for more connections, and these songs really don’t hold up to that level of scrutiny, even when Hadreas’ wavering voice makes the pain and fear that informs these songs so easy to feel.
The overall mood is what makes the strongest impression here: a piano album damaged by synths, a push-pull between putrid and beautiful, an acute sense of unbelonging and insecurity. Too Bright fits the role of an indie star’s level-up in every way except for the music itself, which nauseates and frustrates more than it bangs. The synthpop glitz is an ironic veneer over what is now clearly Perfume Genius’ most experimental and confrontational record. Hadreas’ expression on the cover, then, is less the steely face of newfound self-possession and more like the look I once saw Janet Jackson shoot the crowd after performing “What About,” violent choreography and all: Chew on this!
