Perfume Genius at the Roundhouse: self-doubt trumps showmanship - Financial Times

The prize for most inappropriate whoop of the year goes to the person who decided that the moment to express their joy was at the end of Mike Hadreas’s cover of “Holocaust” by Big Star, arguably the most miserable song ever written. As Hadreas, who records and performs as Perfume Genius, completed its closing lines — “You’re a wasted face / You’re a sad-eyed lie / You’re a holocaust” — out came the universal sound of the partier.

It was also oddly apposite, though, because Perfume Genius’s show never quite connected. The Roundhouse was nowhere near capacity, which both damped the atmosphere and caused the sound to bounce around. And Hadreas’s music — long on self-doubt and self-examination — wasn’t ideal for a standing venue that wasn’t full enough for the listener to feel enveloped.

This year’s album No Shape has seen Hadreas win the best reviews of his career, expanding his sound from the morose ballads of his early records into something more expansive. He’s spoken of feeling inspired by Bruce Springsteen — not of wanting to sound like him, but wanting to wear his cloak of confidence. And “Wreath”, from that album, had the melodic directness of 1980s pop, but still felt as if Hadreas wouldn’t quite go the whole way — the song cried out for a direct arrangement, but lost its way in a tangle of unnecessarily fiddly rhythm section work. With pan-global musical flavours spicing his more recent music — marimbas, polyrhythms and so on — it sometimes felt like listening to The Lion King soundtrack gone indie.

A long stretch of the morose ballads after only 20 minutes or so killed the momentum, too. They were beautiful songs — “Valley” had the precise direction that some of the bigger numbers lacked — but too concentrated. It was little surprise that when the show ended with people, at last, dancing and punching the air, it was because the final song, “Queen”, is the nearest Hadreas has to a conventional big rock song. He is an enormous talent; but if Hadreas wants to reach out like Springsteen, he has to balance the artist and the entertainer a little better.

★★★☆☆

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