Perfume Genius Embraces the Agony and the Ecstasy at the Studio at the Bomb Factory

For Perfume Genius, the line between agony and ecstasy often seems so thin as to be invisible.

Again and again Tuesday night, the singer-songwriter Mike Hadreas, who performs as Perfume Genius, deftly moved from beauty to brutality, often within the space of a few words. His clarion voice — ringing like a bell, clean and clear and pure — clashed in thrilling fashion with the lithe, muscular roar conjured by the four musicians surrounding him on the cozy stage inside the Studio at the Bomb Factory.

Tuesday marked Hadreas's first headlining appearance in eight years, although the musician has been through town more recently as an opening act (in 2018 for David Byrne at the Winspear Opera House). Perfume Genius is touring behind its seventh and most recent studio album, the expansive and compelling Glory, which was the primary engine for the 80-minute performance.

“I haven’t been here in a long time,” Hadreas noted early on. “Thank you for coming out.” The audience, a couple hundred in all, gathered close and showered the musicians with adoration throughout — those inside the Deep Ellum venue made up in feeling what they may have lacked in number.

The cries of “We love you, Mike!” flew from the darkness all night long — indeed, the crowd on hand really loved Perfume Genius, which felt altogether fitting for such a nervy, soul-baring artist. (“No heckling — it hurts my feelings,” he joked at one point.)
Opening with Glory's sinister, throbbing “In a Row,” Hadreas quickly established the bracing theatricality he would employ during his performance. Wreathed in darkness and smoke, Hadreas stood and slouched and slumped and slid from one side of the stage to the other, enlisting, at various points, the microphone cord, a chair, an inflatable ball, and a small rotating platform at center stage. He often seemed to vacillate between flailing and fighting, surrendering and striking back — a mix of postures as fluid as the melodies.

The scale of the presentation made no concessions to the intimacy of the venue. This was a full-force visual epic, a riot of high-intensity lights and thunderous sound made even more impactful for its proximity to the audience.

Hadreas, who played keyboard for “Me & Angel” but otherwise eschewed an instrument, was joined by guitarist Meg Duffy, bassist Pat Kelly, drummer Tim Carr and his long-time creative and romantic partner Alan Wyffels on keyboards and backing vocals.

The heat and heft of the band provided a striking counterweight to Hadreas’s crystalline falsetto, which reached its apex in a late-set string of songs: The loping, mesmeric “Valley” spilled into the pulsing “Slip Away” (both from 2017’s No Shape) before shifting into the strutting bombast of “On the Floor.”

That trio gave way to the extraordinary “Otherside,” an astonishing blend of stillness and fury which made the room seem as weightless as Hadreas, who mimed floating as the song built to its annihilating conclusion.

The breathtaking “Otherside” would have been the evening’s unquestionable highlight, had Perfume Genius not followed it up with “My Body,” from 2014’s Too Bright, perhaps the most vivid distillation of pain and pleasure in the band’s entire catalog. “I wear my body like a rotted peach / You can have it if you can handle the stink,” Hadreas sang, a harrowing evocation of self-loathing and longing.

Aching in its ruthless self-evisceration, Hadreas stalked the stage, a rock star using his perceived shortcomings as a springboard to transcendence. The galvanizing joy of catharsis radiated outward, a truly moving reminder of how Perfume Genius expertly mines the seam between the awful and the awe-inspiring, unearthing something resembling grace, wrapped inside its haunting, hopeful songs.

See more photos from the show below.