To listen to I Decline, the opening song on Too Bright, or the title track itself, you’d think little had changed in the world of Perfume Genius. Mike Hadreas sings with patient, melancholy sweetness over stately piano notes and a sepia wash of strings, as he did on his two previous releases. But in the spaces between the sedately familiar resides something glittering, defiant and avowedly queer. Queen is brilliant, Hadreas half-spitting a taunt to homophobes over synths metalic as the taste of blood. My Body is blue-velvet cabaret, his voice oozing over a strutting bass, dirty-glamorous despite the self-disgust of the lyrics. That song’s electric guitar screech is heard again in Grid – alongside a repeated lyric from I Decline, as though the album were folding in on itself – a wail amid electric shocks of percussion. Recorded with Adrian Utley of Portishead, Too Bright states its resistance to conformity. Not every effect works (the gloom of I’m a Mother is too airless, the electronic pulse of Longpig too enervating), but on the whole, it’s hypnotic.
