REVIEW: Perfume Genius at Project House
Michael Hadreas walks on stage.
In many ways Perfume Genius, Hadreas’ solo project, is a live band in all conventional sense of the phrase; four musicians and a vocalist playing (more or less) without backing tracks, or much else in the way of pop staging, so this kind of inconspicuous entrance makes sense on paper. But the mythology of Hadreas seems to call for a more dramatic entrance; something involving dry ice, or a platform raised from the floor, curtains opening to reveal him descending from the heavens on wires.
But that’s not what happens, instead, Hadreas walks from side-stage in the 1,000 capacity Project House like he’s at an open mic, as opposed to a headline tour in support of a Grammy-nominated album. There’s a moments silence as the walk-on track ends and the band starts up, and then he’s off, weaving through the taut verses of show-opener ‘In a Row’, before the song breaks into a clattering chorus. From that moment on, Hadreas has the room in the palm of his hand.
Photo: Sam Wilkinson
Debuting at the tail end of the 2000’s, and morphing from a sombre balladeer into a swaggering alt-popstar in a time of Obama-era optimism, Hadreas’ project now finds itself at something of a crossroads in the current political climate. Those two modes of songwriting rear their heads in tandem both across the track list of this year’s stellar album Glory, and the other songs Hadreas chooses to perform here tonight, the mood shifting between reflective and defiant at a moment’s notice. This duality at play is a deft choice, acknowledging the unique power of a show by a queer artist in the current moment whilst retaining the complexity and nuance that made many people, myself included, fall in love with this project in the first place.
On the topic of that Grammy nomination, that it comes for best album cover seems indicative of the kind of artist Hadreas is. Perfume Genius may indeed find themselves in the world of indie and alternative music, but their commitment to “eras” and a strong visual identity owes more to David Bowie and the post-Swift pop-world than it does anything else. And this focus on aesthetic cohesion pays dividends too in fan loyalty; I can’t imagine many other acts prompting me to plan an era-specific outfit in advance (I went for gold accents as a callback to 2014’s Too Bright for those wondering). But, despite his resolutely alternative early career, it doesn’t feel inaccurate to view Hadreas as a popstar of sorts. Maybe if your taste in music skews towards the authenticity-obsessed side of indie this all seems a bit silly to you. But maybe if, like me, you found yourself knowing the members of Harry Styles’ touring band by name at one point in your mid-to-late teens, this kind of communal atmosphere acts as a natural (and probably healthy) progression from the parasocial fandom you experienced earlier in your life.
The era covered by tonight’s show is (as the tote bag I bought from the merch stand to shield a poster from the Yorkshire rain reads) “Glory”; think low-rise blue jeans, high-heeled Stetson boots and Lynchian Americana. Using David Lynch as a reference point for this performance seems apt too, his mixture of the familiar and uncanny is a great point of comparison for the way Hadreas mixes the afterglow of the ambient, largely unsettling experimental work of 2022’s Ugly Season with the more pop-leaning moments on No Shape and Set My Heart on Fire Immediately. What results from these two, vastly different moods is a show completely immersive in the way it blends the line between genres and performance; the band swerving from synth atmospherics to pummelling guitar riffs in a moment’s notice as Hadreas cycles through the tour’s almost improvised-seeming stagecraft involving folding chairs, a flight case and his microphone wires. Whilst the singing and musicianship on stage here is truly impressive too, Hadreas’ dancer-like movements are really the defining feature of the show; limbs and props contorted like visual counterpoints to songs of heartbreak and anxieties, illuminated by abrasive bursts of strobe lights.
Photo: Sam Wilkinson
This iteration of Perfume Genius’ live band deserves specific praise too because, not only do they recreate such nuanced and off-kilter songs with precision for the headline set, but three quarters of them are also pulling double duty as the show’s openers. Support today comes from Hand Habits, the solo project of Meg Duffy, who performs tonight alongside bassist Pat Kelly and drummer Tim Carr as a three-piece band in support of their brilliant recent album Blue Reminder. Not only is Duffy and their band working a double shift here, but a quick Google search of their studio credits outside of their own discography throws up the name of some of the best American alternative albums of the last decade. Not to go all guitar-nerd here but do you know how good of a guitarist you have to be for Adam Granduciel to bring you in to play on a record?
Between a plaintive ballad like ‘Me and Angel’ (where Hadreas takes over keyboard duties from husband Alan Wyffels) and something like the more heavy-rocking ‘Describe’, Perfume Genius present themselves like the photo-negative of a pop group, simultaneously melodic and thunderous. All of that’s to say that what Perfume Genius and Hand Habits present on a cold, seriously rainy Sunday night is, if not a vision of pop’s future, then a vision of an alternate path, one where the Velvet Underground rose to the same level of The Beatles and a man pushing himself around the stage on a flight case can elicit the same reaction from the crowd as a stadium pop show.
Words & Photos: Sam Wilkinson
