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 rainbo...