Wainwrighty!
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[5.38]
Jer Fairall: Put Your Back N 2 It felt like a bit too much gay angst to me after the singularly searing narratives of Learning, but its most discouraging development remains Mike Hadreas’ strides towards learning how to write proper songs, transforming what was once something alien and shakily constructed into something conventional and even maudlin. “Dark Parts” represents both the best and worst of his impulses, opening with a typically portentous and cryptic Hadreas lyric (“The hands of God are bigger than Grandpa’s eyes / but still he broke the elastic on your waist”) before making an immediate turn for the general and the sentimental. The unnerving fragility in both his voice and piano playing carries it all further than it might have gone in other hands, but I’m still left mourning a time when the parts Hadreas took us to would have truly been dark.
[6]
Alfred Soto: As I pointed out a couple months ago, I’m impressed by the deepening of this man’s craft yet repulsed by its being put to such disgusting use. He needs, all the time, and the suffocating production not just complements but insulates him from other people.
[4]
Brad Shoup: The comparisons I want to make are Sufjan, Half-Handed Cloud… all those Asthmatic Kitties that try to put word to nigh-unspeakable deeds. Hadreas’ treatment is a sight less cloying, more like a friend limning the damage and applying a congruent love. Classicist piano waverolls and earthy kickdrum and quavery, expressively-limited high tenor are not normally my bag, and I’m responding more to the text, but it’s a gesture kind enough to merit respect.
[7]
Iain Mew: “I will take the dark part of your heart into my heart” is a wonderful sentiment. It works as a moment of truth and triumph because it comes at the end of a song that offers so much struggle to get to that point. I’m OK with that.
[7]
Ramzi Awn: The uber-poignant chorus has less impact than one of Thom Yorke’s wails, and overall, Perfume Genius’ “genuine” delivery in “Dark Parts” offers about as much profundity to his insipid lyrics as Dr. Phil offers to his patients. The darkness of shame can be a part of music, but there is little art to this embarrassment.
[2]
Katherine St Asaph: Paul Simon collapsed halfway through “The Sound of Silence.” No one could find a hologram in time, so one of the stage techs had to fill in from a mic backstage. He really related to the song, see. He once bawled and scrawled this drivel onto the subway walls.
[3]
Anthony Easton: I genuinely worry that it is an essential and unchecked cultural misogyny that allows me to love profoundly the melancholy decadence of work done by men that sounds like this — especially the scraping that occurs before the piano — and have little or no energy for work that sounds like this coming from Newsom or Apple. I don’t know what that means. The line “I will take the dark part of your heart into my heart” sung before the woos is just soul-crashingly lovely though.
[9]
Jonathan Bradley: Mike Hadreas makes Seattle music that sounds like Seattle, and he’s hardly the first Puget Sound area artist to reflect the city’s gray skies with instrumentation as soft and warm as wool sweaters and damp as drizzle. Perfume Genius fits neatly into a long lineage that includes the early work of Death Cab for Cutie and the Microphones as well as local lights such as Grand Hallway, or Some By Sea, or Damien Jurado. But while the weather west of the Cascades may seem unremittingly middling, the landscape isn’t. Similarly, the best examples of this sound suggest majesty lies beyond humdrum modesty: that human drama can be found in quiet bedsits. “Dark Parts” handwaves, maybe, at death or fidelity, but then again, it might not even do that. It’s too dreary to be sure. It’s like sitting in traffic on I-5, in March.
[5]