Perfume Genius and Gazelle Twin don’t wallow in vulnerability — they weaponize it.
We are taught few strategies to survive in society as Others: we must assimilate completely or endure, hopeful but precarious, in its margins. Queers must deal with the sticky residues of trauma any way they can, and how can one shield themselves from hurt while being vulnerable enough to satisfy their yearning for connection, for intimacy? Often times we can only rely on our bodies, and if they suffer from chronic illnesses, then we are whittled down by physical pain and the crippling cost of medical care. Vulnerability — be it bodily, emotional, economic or societal — burns too bright for one’s eyes to ever adjust entirely.
Yet the personas behind two of 2014’s most exciting album releases manage to mirror the light right back.
Mike Hadreas made his network television debut as Perfume Genius in heavy lipstick, high heels and bondage gear. Gleefully transgressive onstage and in his music videos, Hadreas gives the people threatened by his existence — so prone to pointing, staring and laughing — a confrontational wink.
Too Bright explores, euphorically, a character borne out of anger, but it also does much more. Although “Queen” demands that we flip society off with a finger painted in glitter if it doesn’t want us to survive, some of the album’s ballads show how even the loudest ‘fuck-off’ is still fueled by the echoes of self-loathing and romantic failure. With spare piano accompaniments in “Don’t Let Them In” and “No Good”, Hadreas narrates his path towards truly believing that he matters, even while making people froth at the mouth just by existing: “Am I meant to fray the end? / On the outside looking in / all used up / never used enough”.
The most complex emotions in Too Bright come from its sonically weirdest moments. The distorted synth pulse of “My Body” sounds exactly like the darkest pits of self-hatred: “I wear my body like a rotted peach / you can have it if you handle the stink”. On “Grid”, Hadreas augments the songs’ throbbing industrial tension with creepy children’s chants. He’s “a diamond swallowed and shit / and swallowed again”. “I’m A Mother” is dreamy, opaque and profoundly unsettling, like trying to navigate the depths of one’s fucked-up psyche.
But by the album’s closer ballad, it’s clear that Hadreas has achieved a sense, however fragile, of hopeful self-acceptance. He croons of finally being able to understand his “heart long-desperate / oh for something I had all along”. The last lines of Too Bright are the most convincing statement of the healing power of loving oneself; after the bleakest journey, he is now ready to create: “I don’t need your love / I don’t need you to understand / I need you to listen”.
Elisabeth Bernholtz’s character under the Gazelle Twin moniker is clad in a blue hoodie and blurs her features with a skin-colored balaclava. It looks more at home haunting old VHS home movies, as the subject of 2-AM Internet horror story posts, or as the protagonist of a fever-induced nightmare. In her Lynchean, highly claustrophobic music videos, she isn’t a gendered physical entity; she is fear personified.
Unlike Too Bright, the 40 minutes of industrial electronica of Unflesh tackle big topics such as suicide, body dysmorphia, miscarriages and the excesses of the food industry. Nonetheless, it’s clear that Bernholtz’s feral identity in the album is, like Hadreas’, a survival strategy that both shields her from society and stunts her efforts to connect emotionally with other people. The supermarket scanner loop and rhythmic pants of “Belly of the Beast” foreground Gazelle Twin at her most militant: “I’ll beat them all at their own game / bite the hands and the fingers that feed”. It could easily be the soundtrack to a ritual, blood-soaked sacrifice. Yet on the spare, pulsing beats of “Human Touch” she still acknowledges that “it’s the sense of human touch / that gives us celebration”.
Unflesh is, at its best, an expression of the oppression within Bernholtz’s own mind, and it carves out a tiny physical space that makes some of its songs feel like the jackhammering of a terrible headache. “Anti Body” is, true to its name, the sounds of her body as a machine pummeling out her worst traumas, anxieties and phobias: “When I was fourteen / I hid in his room / hoping I would sleep / never be exhumed”. “Exorcise”, with its monotone, genderless drone and interpolated barks, builds abrasive momentum to describe the horror of “a kind of dream / there’s no way to wake up from”. Worse, as she screams in its overwhelming climax, “IT’S ALL IN MY MIND!”.
It’s unclear if Bernholtz ever achieves the kind of enlightened acceptance Hadreas does. The most peaceful cuts in Unflesh, however, show her fascinating process of cathartic grief. The lullaby-like melody of “Premonition” could have come from a haunted SNES cartridge—tender, nostalgic, wistful. On the ethereal “Good Death”, she mourns her lack of humanity: “the mind plays cold tricks / when you’re lonely”. The final round of screams in “Still Life” sum up Unflesh pretty nicely. It’s a brutal horror show Bernholtz needed a public exorcism to somehow be at peace with her body.
2014 was a shit year. It reminded us of how little democracy cares for the lives of people at the margin, and the creeping sense of helplessness throughout the year wore us down. Its best albums, nonetheless, reinvigorate the will to fight back. Burning too bright or going feral are imperfect strategies, but Hadreas and Bernholtz do their damn best. Right now, it’s just what we need.
