Mike Hadreas's fifth album under the Perfume Genius moniker is a bold and intense examination of love, sex and the many emotions involved with both.
Hadreas builds overwhelming drama and tension both by stripping everything away, as on Moonbend, a haunting portrait of desire, and building layers, complete with a low bass guitar, backing vocals and a harpsichord on Jason, an intimate account of a one-time romantic encounter.
It’s frequently intense but even when the album seems at its darkest, there is light; opener Whole Life transforms mournfulness at half a lifetime being “gone” into hope, both lyrically (“Shadows soften toward some tender light / In slow motion I leave them behind”) and musically, as delicate piano ushers in the second verse.
Leave, which includes the line which gives the album its title, is cinematic, with vocals quieting to a whisper before the Eighties-inspired On The Floor chimes in with a lustful pop interval. The darker Your Body Changes Everything addresses all-consuming love and desire, with Hadreas’s song-writing at its most poetic (“You are anchoring / until you fit beneath me / and you’re breaking like a wave”) before he hints at the downsides of such passionate yearning: “Now you’re right above me/ and your shadow suffocates.”
