Perfume Genius: Ugly Season

The clash between acoustic instrumentation and crackerjack production creates a rich and expansive screen experience. Mills' harmony on “Herem” bubbles with dread from the song's swirling production before programmed drums bring the arrangement to a cathartic finish. The clarinet swells provide an immense moment of bliss in “Teeth”. Hadreas' sighing vocals on “Pop Song” turn into playful cooing when rattles and percussion hit the mix. Compared to previous albums, such rousing peaks are less immediate, on tracks that exceed seven minutes and leave choruses in the dust. Take your time with this music, however, and the flashes of angular beauty leave a deep impression, like watching a peacock strut and flash its magnificent plumage for a moment at a time.

In places, Bad season reminds me of Prince's 1986 album Parade, another score that transcended its source material, balancing progressive highs with an occasional, elusive, disjunctive structure. In place of Prince's intense eroticism, Perfume Genius' stylistic smorgasbord treats sex like a boring affair, fitting the record's other preoccupation: sadness. Typically, the album seems to fall apart in the middle. “Scherzo,” an unadorned piano composition by Wyffels, serves as a melancholy comedown after the first suite of songs. This strange bit of sequence stitches the wound Ugly Season's in the middle, as if Adreas wants you to see the stitches.

Less narrative than ever, his lyrics shine with a symbolic vocabulary rooted in gay culture. He often compares bodies to plants and fruit: “Stretched like a reed,” he sings in “Herem” and “Pop Song,” ordering us to “harvest the pit/And spit out the rest.” He views sex as a magical ritual in some tracks, and in “Teeth” he recalls the same 19th-century context in which a gay identity began to coalesce in the West. “A fading garland,” he describes: “A skull on a plate.” For the first time, Perfume Genius sings in still lifes, and typically, the album reflects the same focus – the wordless closer “Cenote” echoes the opening notes of the first track in a simpler solo piano arrangement, like a gallery presenting the study one works alongside his final canvas.

Bad season it has a unique narrative ornament, one of the largest carved by Adreas. “Hellbent” reprises the character of Jason, the occasional lover of a confused narrator, from eponymous climax of Perfume Genius' latest record. “They took my phone,” the speaker emphasizes, perhaps because he just escaped rehab. Alone on the side of the road, bleeding from his arm (due to a heavy fall, we imagine), he clings desperately to the heartbreaking belief that he can charm his connection into helping him. “First car that stopped/Just took a look and drove,” he spits and tells us several minutes later, “If I get to Jason's and do a show/Maybe he'll soften up and give me a loan.”

Here, Perfume Genius channels the empathy that drew us to his tunes in the first place, capturing the chaos of his character by balancing a first-person sneer with the clarity of distance and maturity. Chantreas, who began his music career when he got sober in his twenties, has already mastered this genre of songwriting. However, the result seems recently urgent in the atmospheric Bad season, like a buried, wounded memory that begins to pulsate again through the mists of time. Pop music tends to offer the amnesia lozenge to almost everyone, allowing even homophobes and homosexuals to erase their differences, if only for three minutes at a time. Hadreas refuses to brew such pills for his admirers. His sprawling post-pop draws our attention to the many ways in which changing ourselves can never resolve our memories of the past, posing an implicit question: Can we really leave behind the people we were, or just learned to keep our eyes fixed on the promise of self-reinvention?