Perfume Genius : Glory
Hello everyone, it’s me, the person who vastly prefers Ugly Season with its avant-garde textures and deep texturalism over the other records Michael Hadreas has released under the Perfume Genius name. Obviously, I’m aware of his sharp acumen as a songwriter; his work prior to Ugly Season was an upward climb for me until Set Your Heart On Fire Immediately, the clear apex up until that point of his more song-oriented material. My natural disposition leaning away from this style of music means that for it to click with me, it has to really dig into a clear emotionalism beyond just vibes, between curated lines in the lyrics and a keener ear for sophisticated sound palettes rather than just whatever cutesy instrument or cheap effect is the sound du jour at the moment. Perfume Genius had several years ago crossed those thresholds for me. It seemed only fitting to professionally put my money where my mouth is regarding his work.
It’s somewhat of a shock to me how his latest, Glory, lands somewhere between The Bends-era Radiohead and the band Live, who despite being comically melodramatic are additionally one hell of a set of lyrical dramatists, having a unique enough vocal timbre mirrored here paired with some shockingly literate lyrics. Swapping the musical backing for something closer to the post-Beatles songsmithery of Radiohead circa the early-mid ’90s married to the country-rock proximal sound in certain corners of indie rock and pop complement the vocal delivery a good bit better, marrying some earthiness to the potential melodrama of Hadreas’ wavering singing voice. Sometimes, this works against his favor; tracks such as “Clean Heart” for instance feel perpetually held back from the big euphoric bursting that seems waiting inside of them. Granted, finding a way to have those raucous releases without falling into stereotypical indie cheese is tricky, so the restraint is not necessarily fully a bad thing.
Glory faces the same metaphysical problem all works following an experimental outing face. How much of the side work do you triage into the main focus of your next major work? How much would feel like diverting the overall shape of your body of work and how much left aside would feel like wasted potential left to wither on the vine? The philosophy of how best to square those many circles is perhaps a bit too complex for a review of a record to cover, but even just gesturing at them shows one of the base frustrations of Glory. Had this come in 2018, it would have felt like a solid iterative take on his developing sound. In the wake of Heart and Ugly, twins separated at birth given the conditions of their mutual creation, it is hard not to feel this as anything but a step back. Too many ideas feel lost, with his eye focused on songcraft to a degree that can sometimes occlude sonic ambitions.
This sensation is further frustrated by songs as clearly successful as “Full On,” which opens the second half of the record. That track is carried by a stately and sophisticated harp glissando, synthesizers and nylon string guitars, woodwinds and soft choirs, in a way that feels as much like Kate Bush’s faerie music as it does early Genesis at their most pastoral and deliberately arranged. (For real; compare it to “Ripples” or “Carpet Crawlers”.) A song like this shows a clear and potent hybrid of the former song-oriented material of the pre-Ugly Season records with that one’s breakthrough regarding more fibrous and engaged sets of textures and timbres beyond their melodic or harmonic information, a trait that many pieces on the back half of the record carry with them. It gives me hope that Glory is functionally a recalibrating record, not a finalized aesthetic vision but a step toward a gainful and workable format for the next few years of material. Some records prove their worth for better or worse immediately; this one feels highly contingent on what comes after, what it presages and what it forecloses, rather than merely the material on it alone.
Label: Matador
Year: 2025
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