A weekend to revolutionize local music scene

Hipster drivel: Perfume Genius’ ‘Too Bright’ is unapologetically raw

“No family is safe when I sashay,” announced Mike Hadreas, under the moniker Perfume Genius, this summer with the release of his brilliant, scintillating single “Queen.” Hide your kids, hide your wife, hide your hard-cover copies of the NAS report—because on his latest album “Too Bright,” Hadreas emerges from his bedroom to prance saucily down the catwalk. His previous efforts, 2010’s intimate “Learning” and 2012’s intense “Put Your Back N 2 It,” felt cloistered and claustrophobic, but “Too Bright” shines with a defiant radiance. In the past, voice cracking and spirit shaking, Hadreas sang about having an affair in high school with a teacher who then threw himself off a building. Now, still haunted, he offers no apology.“I Decline,” the record’s opener, sets this tone with its lyrics of modest refusal. He describes an angel hovering overhead, arms extended in a welcoming embrace, warm smile plastered on its face. It’s a nice image, but Hadreas is in no mood for otherworldly support. He considers the offer for a moment over spare piano chords, and finally murmurs, “that’s all right. I decline.” From this Majical Cloudz-like moment, Hadreas does an about face and channels his inner Freddie Mercury on “Queen.” The power-chord thrust, tingling synths, and hip-shaking gutturals certainly recall Queen the band, but “Queen” the song retains Hadreas’ trademark discomfiting lyrics. “Don’t you know your queen?” he asks, no coincidence that it sounds very much like “don’t you know you’re queer?” Decay features prominently in “Too Bright.” Internalized shame becomes corrosive, as Hadreas’ damaged soul eats away at its cage. On “No Good,” Hadreas wonders if he is “meant to fray to the end” as his body unravels, leaving no place to hang his heart. Not one to give in so easily, he turns the decay into a dare: “I wear my body like a rotted peach / You can have it if you can handle the stink.” The spooky, spidery lurch of “My Body” makes it one of the best dance songs on the album, all the more when it explodes halfway through into the best synth pulse Depeche Mode never wrote.The true centerpiece of “Too Bright,” however, is the soul-swinging, thumb-snapping ode to love-induced idiocy, “Fool.” Hadreas croons to an anonymous lover about picking out a dress for the night, before flitting out of the room to dance. The song fades almost to silence before the synth grows stronger, and Hadreas lets out a swelling gasp of ecstasy, like a fool in love who can’t believe his luck. He sounds more assured for the rest of the song, helped along by the sexy sputter of a sax, when he “does a little move...like a buffoon.” At once self-deprecating and self-accepting, “Fool” showcases all of Perfume Genius’ strengths: his evocative lyrics, impeccable arrangement, and tight sequencing. Most of all, it highlights just how powerful of a singer Hadreas is, his voice shimmering and glimmering, as much Jónsi as Antony. “Fool” is not only fluttery and precise, but also firm and proud, a balance Hadreas maintains perfectly throughout the album.On “Too Bright,” Perfume Genius proves he is deserving of the eponym. He is able to distance himself from the camp of disco music while drawing on the aesthetic of othered musicians who turned the marginal mainstream. But Hadreas does not write gay anthems in the vein of the Village People. The introversion of being raised as the ugly duckling of chillwave’s final brood still shows on “Too Bright.” Like Youth Lagoon before him, Hadreas takes bedroom experiences and blows them up into arena-sized stories. If there’s a manifesto for what “humanity” means in 2014, it’s the message of this record—we’re all a little hurt and a little beautiful. Hadreas claims he is “Too Bright,” but we can’t look away.

Hipster drivel: With Taylor Swift, it's complicated

Before Vampire Weekend proved it was more than an Ivy League novelty, before Frank Ocean crooned his way into our bedsheets, before LCD Soundsystem bade farewell to a generation of dance-punk converts, before Nicki Minaj silenced the haters with her spitfire feature on “Monster,” and before Mark Kozelek told the War on Drugs to suck his cock, I listened to Taylor Swift.
Once, an age ago, I was a romantic. You may not know this about me. There might be a positive correlation between acne and sentimentality, or pubescence and feelings, or maybe this teenager was just born to pine.
My stoic demeanor and baggy shirt hid an exploding heart (the metaphor, not the band). I once delivered roses to a girl at the ballet. When I couldn't bear the weight of the heartbreak that my adolescence invited, I'd close the door to my self-hate-nest, cozy up to a teddy bear, and break out my Tay Sway. I loved “Fearless.”
I think Swift is very good at what she does. Even as a moody male teen I identified with her love-lorn characters. Her transition from bright-eyed, tug-at-your-heart-strings acoustic classics to four-on-the-floor pop hits felt inevitable, but she has done it with elegance.
That is why I would not call her a guilty pleasure—why should we be ashamed of enjoying good craft? But sadly, the magic has run out. If Taylor Swift's new album “1989,” is guilty of something, it's of never even entering the orbit of guilty pleasure.
I stopped listening to Taylor Swift after making my blood pact with hipsterdom. In fact, I stopped listening to female artists at all. In switching off the car stereo, I not only turned away from the trite lyrics and predictable chord progressions of the Top 40, but also fled from a land where queens reigned supreme. The Best New Music section of Pitchfork was filled with edgy acts—though most were all-male outfits.
Convincing myself that I only liked to listen to lead singers who were male, I flirted with, and fell for, the homoeroticism of Franz Ferdinand.
I bought my first pair of skinny jeans, donning a sultry look that put the “sexual” in “metrosexual” (no high-end accoutrement could afford me the prefix) and channeled my teenage heartbreak into the aesthetic of a wounded but snobbish hunk.
I found romance not in Taylor Swift's high school dramas, but in Arcade Fire's tragic tales of love and woe and in the Civil War shanties of the Decemberists.
At the turn of the decade, the phallocentricity of the Great Albums canon makes it read like the Great Books canon. I mean this almost literally, with Sufjan Steven's biblical history lessons and the romantic erudition of Bon Iver.
Where are the women in the “Best Of” lists? The collapse of punk in the early 1990s gave birth to an aggressive female style, as bands like Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney upended essentialist notions of femininity. Of the top thirty albums of the 1990s, according to Pitchfork, only one can claim the appellation “feminist”: Liz Phair's “Exile in Guyville.” (The only other female artist in the top thirty is Bjork, though a handful of the bands listed have female members.)
The riot grrrl movement of the 1990s was at the margins of marginalized music. Compare the riot grrrl to the trope of the sensitive male singer-songwriter of today. With his aching falsetto, skin-tight denim, and wistful coo, he approaches the classical feminine with more commercial success and cultural caché than the riot grrrls. At what point does masculine sensitivity edge out female versatility?
This is just to say that there are women who compose fearless pop music who should not be eclipsed by the bland pop affect Taylor Swift adopts on “1989.”
Mary Timony, best known for her work in Helium in the mid-90s, comes to mind. The snotty power-pop of the debut of her new band, Ex Hex, is memorable without resorting to the generic yawns rampant in “1989.”
Ex Hex may contribute nothing new to a long tradition of garage rock, but to hear a trio of women perfecting the art of rocking the fuck out with insta-classic riffs is a sonic windfall.Speaking of rocking the fuck out, Sleater-Kinney announced its return in style with its first new song in nearly a decade. “Bury Our Friends” is a three-minute whirlwind of slashing guitars during which Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein exchange yelps as sharp as the cuts of a rapier. Their advice: “Exhume our idols, bury our friends!” Maybe it's time we put down the Taylor Swift and dusted off our Bikini Kill. Let's dig up a better sort of feminist. Resurrect the riot grrrl.

Hipster drivel

A weekend to revolutionize local music scene

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

Matthew Goodrich

Orient Staff

October 17, 2014

It's mid-October and Bowdoin students have found themselves—inexplicably, astonishingly and possibly for the very first time—in the unenviable position of prioritizing which concert venue they'd like to patronize on a Friday night. I mean patronize in one sense of the word when I refer to Port City Music Hall and in the other sense when I refer to Colby College.

On Friday evening, and no doubt into witching-hour Saturday, both establishments will be alit with the flame only live music can bring. This flame will be punctuated only by the flitting of bearded Portlanders doing their best CBB cat impersonations, and college students acting the part of debonair Portlanders. Neither will succeed, though that hardly matters.

Never underestimate the spiritual healing power of a concert. Rejoice, driveling hipsters of Bowdoin: a musical renaissance is upon us.

I refer, of course, to We Were Promised Jetpacks’ lamentably pedestrian arrival in Portland and Chance the Rapper's spontaneous decision to tour schools already disappointed by Macklemore. For a city and a college that has booked, in recent memory, Skrillex and Wiz Khalifa, this is indeed a renaissance.

I leave it up to my readers to decide which brand of diatonic delivery—Scottish braying or frenetic free association—best satisfies their nocturnal needs, though I can offer some advice for students looking to up their indie cred.

At Port City, order a local brew (or, if underaged, a tonic water, no ice) and whisper a bit too loudly to the Portlanders around you that the only reason you're here is to see the opener, The Twilight Sad. Bonus points if you can work in a joke about Scottish independence, or heckle them with Frightened Rabbit lyrics. At Colby, simply look dour and unapproachable, with a scowl that states—not screams—“I go to Bowdoin.”

Not that we have to nurse our superiority complex for long. After all, Saturday night brings noisy surf-rock poster boy Wavves and his punkish super soaker sound to Morrell Lounge. Time will tell how kindly Maine autumn and 2014 treats his music, though I remain cautiously optimistic, if only because I retain a pinch of nostalgia for the time when musicians added a redundant consonant to their names.

Between his hyped sophomore effort “Wavvves” and “Afraid of Heights,” the album he apparently released last year, Nathan Williams has amassed an array of tight, catchy tunes about sunshine, alcohol and bikinis. Since Saturday's event will feature, at best, two-thirds of the content of Williams' auditory output, students ought to apply whichever they can get their hands on vigorously. I, for one, will be leaving my Best Coast tanning oil at home.
Pending any unforeseeable disaster, Wavves will be the first fall concert I've attended at Bowdoin, and I intend to enjoy it immensely. In 2011, a failed attempt to change Bowdoin students' narcotic of choice from alcohol to marijuana was thwarted when contract hysterics caused Neon Indian and his chilled out psychadelia to withdraw last minute. Surfer Blood went on in his stead. I am told he is Kreayshawn’s cousin. However, I can't vouch for the veracity of this, for I was at the Cumberland County Civic Center with my father—and possibly the newly outed Deadhead Paul Franco—seeing Furthur, a jam band formed out of the dregs of the Grateful Dead.

My sophomore year, I was shacked up in Reed House, taking the term “lock-in” much too seriously to bother checking out RJD2. Last year, as my readers surely regretted, I was studying in England and not writing about music. (Instead, I wrote about pasties and saw Godspeed You! Black Emperor).

Usually, fall semester is a much more agreeable time for live music at Bowdoin than its spring sibling. Over the past month, I have seen Future Islands and Sun Kil Moon work magic for their Portland audiences in two very different ways. If I trust the musical taste of a punk legend turned medievalist, I'll be seeing Quintron and Miss Pussycat at the Space Gallery in November. Our tiny music scene, though once a crime scene witnessing the death of Galaxie 500, has never quite bulged like this before.

Hopefully, the E-Board can bring someone to #Ivies150 who neither graduated from Tufts nor will break the endowment. My suggestions: Hansen (a band only ’90s kids will remember), a newly revitalized Death Grips, The Pizza Underground, a CD playing Robert Pollard's “Relaxation of the Asshole” or GWAR.

Until then, this weekend will suffice. I'll go to Wavves, and possibly Chance, or perhaps just dance to the new Flying Lotus album. Bowdoin super-senior Tanner Horst, both older than granite and hewn from marble, says it's some “next-level shit.” Either way, the weekend will rock.

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