The best albums of 2017, No 5: Perfume Genius – No Shape - The Guardian

Several records this year aimed to bridge the gap between high art and the melodic mainstream: St Vincent’s Masseduction and Moses Sumney’s Aromanticism, to name just two. But even those tremendous outings had their longueurs. Perfume Genius’ No Shape boasted end-to-end action: fear, happiness, abasement, transcendence, all borne along on breathtakingly original music.

Anyone who has gone the distance with Perfume Genius – from his tremulous first album, 2010’s Learning, through to the carnivorous flamboyance of 2014’s Too Bright – will have clocked this Seattle musician’s twin obsessions: catharsis wrapped in a kind of body horror, and the pursuit of its opposite, the sublime.

No Shape, Mike Hadreas’s fourth studio album, parks many of those old bodily concerns. Disgust takes a rest. Here, on his most sumptuous work (props also to producer Blake Mills), Hadreas merely wants to be unbound, to “hover with no shape” – in part, as a consequence of living with Crohn’s disease and the binary that exists around gender. Magnificently, his inventive score and dramatic arrangements more than live up to the challenge, as Hadreas swaps forms, time and again. Nagging, minimal funk? He’s got that covered on Go Ahead, complete with vocals that swoop and mutter. Barely there soul? Die 4 You is as elegant a song about erotic asphyxiation as you could wish for. Stringed terror? Choir unleashes the paranormal, the kind of hovering with no shape Hadreas is perhaps less keen on. See also Otherside, when an electronic orchestra is dropped like an anvil on Hadreas’ spiritual questing.

A number of songs consider love, but rarely in conventional ways. Run Me Through is a throwback to the knife-edge Hadreas used to inhabit, a song about “toxic masculinity” in which a series of impressionistic syllables rub up against a slinky backing that’s almost jazz. Mostly, though, there’s the consolation and struggle of commitment. On the old-timey shimmering Sides, Hadreas and his guest, the hypnotic singer Weyes Blood, taking opposite corners in a relationship, with Hadreas voicing the imagined discontents of his partner, Alan Wyffels (Hadreas’s remoteness, chiefly).

It all ends with a quiet love song for Wyffels, in which Hadreas notices that they both “sleep through the night”. Moreover, “everything’s all right”. This situation is no casual holding pattern. It’s a state of grace you suspect Perfume Genius has strived hard to attain, both musically and in person.

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