The Quietus

In 2011, Mike Hadreas worried that his music was too simple. “Why would people come and pay money for something so tiny?” he asked. His debut album, 2010’s Learning, was indeed, insular in its sonic assertions — but huge in its open vulnerability, as Hadreas tackled topics of acceptance, abuse and intimacy. This exploration continued through to the wistful, introspective nature of 2012’s Put Your Back In 2 It but it was 2014’s Too Bright that marked a shift in the Perfume Genius project.   It was an album that came guns-a-blazing, as Hadreas commanded, “No family is safe, when I sashay” on lead single ‘Queen’. The electronic-swells, moody percussion and often animalistic vocal delivery thrusting forward a new dawn for a songwriter who was known for his timid poignancy and subdued disposition. Hadreas continues this undeterred journey on what is perhaps his most assured and confident album, No Shape.   First single ‘Slip Away’ begins with the line, “Don’t hold back, I want to break free” and it’s in this that Hadreas introduces us to the pleasure of a Perfume Genius without restraint; an artist who is ready to give us everything. Here, he elevates the pleasure of brazen intimacy, as the introductory tracks dominate the senses with explosions of delirious euphoria, both in their lyrical context and in their lush, swarming texture.   This introduction is almost teasing however, as ‘Otherside’ opens with soft, delicate keys and eerie, silkened vocals – reminiscent of a pre-2014 Hadreas – before it explodes into a transcendent other-world. Star-like ripples burst through an operatic crescendo, glistening with glittery, electronic swells and angelic vocals that give the promise of an album that is both tenacious and sensitive.   This tenacity sees No Shape puff its chest in the face of adversity – “You can even say a little prayer for me, baby I'm already walking in the light” he teases on the defant ‘Go Ahead’; “They'll talk, give them every reason, for child, you walk” he asserts on the dreamy ‘Just Like Love’. Here, Hadreas admires those who have never felt as though they fit in, perhaps sending a letter to his younger self and in turn, blossoming into a sparkling, self-assured convener.    The album isn’t without its vulnerability though. On the moody, trip-hop led beat of ‘Die 4 U’, Hadreas evokes an erotic intimacy, as he breathlessly begs his lover to linger in the moment, offering a devoted commitment in the face of a world that offers only uncertainty. On ‘Valley’, he speaks of a relationship left in ruins, his vocal delivery full of earnest sorrow that juxtaposes the song’s child-like rhythms. “How long must we live right, before we don't even have to try?” he asks, desperate and searching.   In terms of its sonic intent, No Shape is without-a-doubt Hadreas’ most vigorous effort to date. Juxtaposing the graceful strings of ‘Every Night’ with the frantic virtuosity of ‘Choir’, No Shape moulds itself to each story, whether it be the tentative nature of Weyes Blood collaboration ‘Sides’ or the darkened cabaret of ‘Run Me Through’. The explorative nature of the instrumentation urges Hadreas to bend his vocal delivery, which he does so with an impressive stamina.   Put bluntly, No Shape is essentially an album about love, in all its messy, beautiful glory. It’s fitting then, that last track ‘Alan’ is a faithful tribute to his long-term partner and musical collaborator Alan Wyffels. “Thought I'd hide, maybe leave something, secret behind, never thought, I'd sing outside,” he sings, affirming that it was this love that allowed him to come out from the shadows, to break free from his introspective doubts. “I’m here, how weird” he belts, feeling the earth beneath his feet, the sun on his face. What might seem unremarkable to others, is transformative for Hadreas and its in No Shape that we’re invited to feel those same effects.

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Pitchfork 88

From ancient Lesbos to ’60s SoHo, drag balls to Paradise Garage, queer havens aren’t just shelters created in opposition to the wider world, but hives of imagination and creativity where alternate realities reign, even if they sometimes dissolve at dawn. Perfume Genius’ fourth album, No Shape, is one of them. On 2014’s Too Bright, Mike Hadreas laid down the law when he commanded, “No family is safe when I sashay,” on the iconic “Queen.” But this time, he’s scarcely interested in using his steely blue gaze to challenge bigots. Instead, he preserves it to revere Alan Wyffels, his long-term boyfriend and musical collaborator, and to elevate their love to a heavenly plane. He and Wyffels met as recovering addicts—on No Shape, hard-won stability is a sacrament.

If Hadreas’ theme is insular, the mood on No Shape’s first half is ecstatic. These songs swoop and chatter like flocks of mad starlings, light up like religious paintings, flounce like all the pink frills in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, make the cosmos explode inside your ribs. If that sounds like too much, that’s the point. No Shape rebukes tasteful minimalism and embraces beauty at its most transgressive, harking back to the aestheticism and decadence movements of the 19th century, as well as Kate Bush and Prince’s most lurid extroversions. This inflated yet elegant dynamic sustains Hadreas’ own private joy: “If you never see them coming/You never have to hide,” he sings on “Slip Away,” a song that sounds perpetually under siege in a majestic fantasy battle. A few lines later, he insists, “If we only got a moment/Give it to me now,” and holds up his end of the bargain by giving literally everything he’s got.

Even if it’s a feint, Hadreas’ confidence is brazen and contagious. He subverts religious devotion on “Just Like Love,” admiring a young queer in an outlandish outfit. They’re “christening the shape,” and “cultivating grace,” and they walk “just like love.” It’s the kind of song that makes rags feel like ball gowns, and should probably have been playing when Botticelli painted The Birth of Venus. A prowling bass adds lust to Hadreas’ admiration, his crooned vocal styling referencing the period in the 1920s when intimate, amplified male voices were vilified for challenging ideas about how real men should sing. Using that register to exalt another man’s appearance is even more radical, and Hadreas knows it as he instructs the object of his affection to stand tall in the face of opposition: “When it happens again/Baby, hold on and stare them down.”

On Too Bright, bodies were “cracked, peeling, riddled with disease,” rotting fruit, sources of shame and revulsion that recalled Francis Bacon’s contorted 1970s portraits. Here, they’re as divine as the same-sex lovers depicted in trailblazing fin de siècle artist Simeon Solomon’s paintings. Hadreas lets himself be beautiful on “Go Ahead,” where he shuts down gawking onlookers with a withering retort. “What you think?/I don’t remember asking,” he tuts. He humors them for a moment—“You can even say a little prayer for me/Baby, I’m already walking in the light”—before throwing in a musical punchline at their expense, too, a moment of ambient reflection dismissed by a tart, cartoonish chime that he deploys like a sprinkle of Himalayan salt. The final part of the song whirrs and glitters, propelling Hadreas towards the heavens as he urges once more, “Go ahead—go ahead and try,” knowing nothing can touch him.

Transcendence is key to No Shape, and at its most explicit on “Wreath,” which references Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” both in its lyrics and breathless spirit. Like “Slip Away,” it’s a race to outrun the inevitable—in this case, Hadreas’ own physical form and identity, the prejudice projected onto it and the Crohn's disease within it. “I’m gonna peel off every weight/Until my body gives way/And shuts up,” he swears. Post-Trump, the Jenny Holzer Truism, “THE IDEA OF TRANSCENDENCE IS USED TO OBSCURE OPPRESSION” has regathered its power, as if urging vigilance against fantastical ideas. But for marginalized artists, that escape offers a short reprieve from psychological and physical persecution. To demand that Hadreas and his kin exist only in opposition to the political abyss is its own form of constriction. No Shape is a transcendental protest record and the divide between its two halves makes patently clear the challenge of staying present, staying alive, and staying in love as a queer person in 2017. “How long must we live right/Before we don’t even have to try?” Hadreas cries on “Valley General,” a graceful, pulsing tribute to another lost soul.

Most of No Shape’s first half finds Hadreas holding a pose in the outside world, refusing to conform. But it's hard to convince yourself of your own power, and on album’s second half, he struggles to break free. The blossom falls from the trees, leaving a claustrophobic atmosphere that recalls Mary Margaret O’Hara’s Miss America, David Bowie’s Low, and Angelo Badalamenti’s Soundtrack From Twin Peaks. Each song creaks eerily, indicating a lingering but unseen presence: a ghost on the queasy “Every Night”; threatening voices that haunt Hadreas’ sleepless nights on frenzied violin freakout “Choir”; a lover on “Sides,” a gorgeous duet with Weyes Blood’s Natalie Mering. Hadreas wanders through this ruined palace of a song, searching for his absent love: “Where do you go sometimes/Idle and empty-eyed?” The song shifts gears from searching to spectral, and Mering trills in response, “Don’t want to watch the world we made break/And it’s never too late to stay.”

Rather than an entreaty from one lover to another, it seems to be a duet between Hadreas’ dueling impulses—the one that wants to dissolve, and the one adjusting to the realization that this is what the long haul looks like, as close to contentment as it gets. It’s not possible to transform into air, but love and sex may offer the closest analog to that weightless freedom he dreams of. His voice is ecstatic and disembodied on “Die 4 You,” which uses erotic asphyxiation as a metaphor for total commitment, a mellow trip-hop beat evoking the supposedly blissful sensation of suffocation. “Run Me Through” is glimmering doom jazz, a twisted cabaret where Hadreas urges, “Wear me like a leather/Just for you,” lingering over each word of his intimate, unsettling proposition.

For all the overwhelming physical sensations on No Shape, nothing is as flooring as “Alan,” the album’s concluding devotional, which echoes the beautiful decay of William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops. “Thought I’d hide,” Hadreas mumbles in an unusually low voice. “Maybe leave something secret behind/Never thought I’d sing outside.” Love saved Hadreas from abjection and gave him his voice when the odds were stacked against his survival. “I’m here,” he marvels. “How weeeeeeiiiiiiiird.” He belts the word like he’s pouring it into the Grand Canyon, his astonished gratitude more than justifying No Shape’s audacious and spectacular high stakes. Being present and being loved is the best anyone can hope for. For some people, it’s so much more than they could ever have expected. What sounds like heaven to Hadreas may seem commonplace to others, but No Shape makes you understand how it looks from his rapturous vantage point.

Drowned In Sound 80

No Shape contains some instant hits. Irresistible first single ‘Slip Away’ is a camp road movie anthem, an alt-pop classic song of liberation, drums crash-landing into the chorus as Hadrias beseeches, “oh love, let all them voices slip away”. ‘Wreath’ —surely a future single— is epic and poignant, full of glistening beauty, laced with gloominess. Think the theme music to Twin Peaks turned into a warm and tender pop rock embrace, visions both light and dark painted by its lyrics: “I see the sun come down/I see the sun come up/I’m moving just beyond the frame/I see the sun come down/I see the sun come up/I see a wreath upon the grave”.

Elsewhere on the record is a smorgasbord of musical elements. ‘Just Like Love’ is a distant cousin of Culture Club’s ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?’ until the chorus kicks in, abandoning the reggae of the verses and going all out on the swooning strings. Unlike ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?’ however, ‘Just Like Love’ is more defiant than wounded, with its refrain of, “They’ll talk/Give them every reason”. Second single ‘Go Ahead’ is awkward lo-fi soul with glitchy beats. ‘Valley’ is a comforting, wistful tune begging the question: “How long must we live right before we don’t even have to try?” Existential quest? Two fingers up at society’s belief in queerness as wrong? Both? Neither? Either way, it hits the heart. ‘Choir’ is sexy, ghostly and claustrophobic. Opener ‘Otherside’ begins with stripped down vocals and piano before exploding into lush synths and vocal textures that sound like the shattering of a thousand crystals.

With such a range of musical stylings on one record, No Shape occasionally sounds more like a collection of songs than a unified album, at times this can be a bit stifling to the listener. Some songs also don’t quite hit the spot of emotional resonance you feel they were aiming for. For example, breathless piano ballad ‘Every Night’ feels a little laboured and underwhelming on an album of such colour and texture elsewhere. But these are minor flaws in a record with many a moment of gorgeousness.

No Shape closes with a song dedicated to Hadrias’ boyfriend and collaborator, the eponymous Alan. I usually find overt partner dedications overly schmaltzy but you can’t help but feel its been earned by Perfume Genius given the homophobia and bigotry upon which his previous record Too Bright focussed. We still live in a world where straight people get a pat on the back for openly declaring their love and queers, particularly those of the femme male variety, get a punch. In this context ‘Alan’ is a sigh of relief and No Shape is a punch back.

Tiny Mix Tapes 80

Perfume Genius
No Shape

[Matador; 2017]

Rating: 4/5

The Guardian 80

True to turbulent form, Mike Hadreas jams together moments of euphoric pop beauty with disruptive ugliness in an album of uniformly fantastic tunes

“I’m here,” sings Mike Hadreas on the final track of No Shape, the unpromisingly titled Alan. “How weird.” It’s presumably a reference to the change in his personal circumstances. By anyone’s standards, the 35-year-old singer-songwriter has lived a turbulent life: a horrendous-sounding adolescence marked by prejudice and violence – he was sent death threats at school and left his hometown of Seattle after being hospitalised in a homophobic attack – family dysfunction, alcoholism and drug addiction, recovery and relapses. Today, however, he finds himself sober and settled: the Alan of the song’s title is his partner and musical collaborator Alan Wyffels.

But it could equally apply to his career path as Perfume Genius. His 2010 debut album Learning and its successor, 2012’s Put Your Back N 2 It were stark, harrowing, inward-looking and filled with despair, their lyrics clearly drawn from experience. His initial signature sound – lo-fi recordings of his voice quivering over a piano audibly in need of tuning – occasionally recalled the work of Daniel Johnson. It was critically acclaimed and clearly the stuff of which small, rabid cult followings and only-you-understand-me fan mail are made.

Related: Perfume Genius interview – ‘Sometimes I wanna rip everything apart’

The Guardian 80

(Matador)
Tortured soul Mike Hadreas takes a huge leap forward on his triumphant, shape-shifting fourth LP

As unique selling points go, “self-acceptance” is perhaps not the sexiest peg upon which to market a fourth album. If you’re a fan of Mike Hadreas, aka Perfume Genius, you’ll have grown accustomed to a level of high drama, to witness statements of longing, fear and self-loathing. Hadreas’s reputation has been made on candour in the face of trauma, of copious self-medication and a subtext of body horror.

These tremulous confessionals have been borne along on piano treatments (albums one and two) or increasingly confident palettes, as on 2014’s angrier Too Bright, where an extrovert tune called Queen declared no family was safe when Hadreas sashayed their way.

‘It’s weird here,’ croaks Hadreas, and you can only agree