It’s attainable that Michael Alden Hadreas, higher often called Fragrance Genius, could be some of the underrated voices in baroque and art-pop. It’s additionally attainable that that is precisely the best way he supposed it to be. Since first breaking onto the scene in 2010 with delicate, confessional piano ballads, Hadreas could have expanded his sonic scope however has maintained a way of intimacy in his work. There’s a quiet violence to him; by no means needing to be loud with a view to be heard. Although nonetheless, simply how groundbreaking Hadreas was could get a bit misplaced typically. He arrived unapologetically queer at a time when the business had barely started to pivot towards consciousness. Songs like his breakout single Queen and Grid explored the abject qualities of queer existence and the irrationality of ideas similar to homosexual panic with an assured and gentile honesty. In some ways, his outward visage transgressed the subject material. For all accounts lovely in each sight and sound, from Too Shiny onwards Hadreas allowed for abjection to turn out to be palatable by means of a neo-dandy presentation. On the duvet of Too Shiny, he seems pristine and gilded. On his debut Studying, his face is distorted by a molten, fungal-like patch. The juxtaposition of aesthetic magnificence and abjection has all the time been central to the Fragrance Genius mythology, and this all culminates and collapses on his newest album, Ugly Season. Right here, his picture is distorted like by no means earlier than; the human kind twisted in layers of grotesque but beautiful decay and maybe for the primary time, the music follows swimsuit.
There’s all the time been a slight experimental edge to his sound, however largely Hadreas’s baroque has functioned inside neatly structured, lovely melodies and total readability. Ugly Season shifts that method nearly all the best way to the left; it’s melodically summary, syncopated, and difficult in a manner that none of its predecessors are. On the opening observe Simply A Room, there’s no lyrics in sight. Reasonably, Ugly Season opens with a Glass-esque composition of tapped piano keys and hushed but guttural moans. There is no such thing as a distinct construction, no clear starting, center, or finish. On Herem, he sings alongside a track construction that’s in fixed flux because it dips out and in of hallucinatory brilliance, stretching his consonants in Björk-esque trend in order that the lyrics and melody turn out to be one and the identical. Like an prolonged fever dream stream of consciousness, Herem flows languidly throughout dunes and desolate sand banks till it buries itself beneath pulsating bass and glowing orbs of drone notes. Pop Track is considerably emblematic of the album’s method normally. It takes acquainted Hadreas pop tropes and completely subverts them. Clips of poetic confessional lyrics, the throb of disco synths, snatches of melody are all fragmented and pasted collectively right into a mutant Fragrance Genius track that’s each acquainted however terrifyingly uncanny. Likewise, Eye In The Wall slowly shifts from dub to what appears like disco pulled by an infinite vacuum; expansive, confrontational, and transportive.
Obtain and stream Ugly Season right here
One in all Ugly Season’s most distinguishable components is how embodied the music feels. It’s no shock that the songs right here are literally the results of Hadreas’s explorations into fashionable dance. There’s a give attention to the physique that’s distinguished from his earlier work, once more coming again to his oscillation between abjection and wonder. The place beforehand on songs like Hood he explores the queer physique by fragile imagery and weak melodies (describing the abject somewhat than changing into it), on Ugly Season the music itself turns into the physique in query. The carnal mysticism of Tooth is much less a poetic recounting of intercourse than it’s a sequence of visceral photos and phrases that recommend the sensation of the physique engaged within the act itself. Prompts like “a cranium sat on a plate,” are all that’s supplied, but intertwined amongst sensually erratic chimes and ecstatic moans, the intention of the picture is evident. The fractured trip-hop and Sam Gendel’s brilliantly demented sax on {Photograph} speaks of obsession and need by related means. Take Put Your Again N 2 It’s “I’ll take the darkish a part of your coronary heart into my coronary heart” in comparison with Ugly Season’s “No fantasy. You Had been meant for me.” It’s a Fragrance Genius much less wrapped up within the romance of myth-making and extra current within the lived expertise.
In some ways, Ugly Season was all the time an inevitable evolution for Fragrance Genius. The shift from shiny eyed queer youth underscored by magnificence and hedonism, towards the truth of queer maturity, much less outwardly lovely and extra inline with the chaos of the lived expertise, is a pure development for an artist who’s all the time managed to talk of queerness by means of honesty. It’s a revolutionary album and resounding triumph for Hadreas that affirms what has all the time been true of him; he’s with out query, too shiny and good.
Watch the quick movie Pygmalion’s Ugly Season by Jacolby Satterwhite that includes music from Ugly Season under.
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