I can’t stop reading and re-reading the review copy I got of a new book, out next week. Liam Inscoe-Jones’s Songs in the Key of MP3: the New Icons of the Internet Age is one of those books where you’ll find yourself shocked that it didn’t exist before: it’s a mapping out of the modern musical and subcultural landscape on terms defined by the millennial artists who’ve come to define it. That is to say, it elegantly cuts loose from establishment critical discourse that has all too often tried to assess artists and subcultures on the criteria of the late 20th century – the print media and television era in which The Rock Star was the dominant archetype and genres were easy to define.
Inscoe-Jones picks SOPHIE, Devonté Hynes, Oneohtrix Point Never, Earl Sweatshirt and FKA twigs as the ultra-individualist artists that provide the spine of his narrative, but he could very easily have added Michael Hadreas aka Perfume Genius to that list. Like all the above, Hadreas is of the “MySpace generation”, building his career in social media’s age of innocence and possibility, and creating an identity and fan community that weren’t beholden to old models. From that he’s become a proper star who sings big, ambitious songs, informed but not defined by his life as a gay man in 21st century America and genre-fluid in a way that leaves critics stumbling over phrases like “baroque pop”, “art pop” and “indie folk” but is – like Inscoe-Jones’s emblematic musicians – really just about building a coherent musical self.
So on his seventh album: Glory is chock full of influences from which Hadreas picks and chooses with absolutely no regard for old oppositions of rock / pop, mainstream / alternative, high / low art, modern / traditional, instinctive / auteur. Like Hynes in particular, he's able to reframe unabashed hints of 20th century sound in a deeply personal way. In any given song you might easily hear Neil Young, Philip Glass and Cyndi Lauper, or U2, Björk and David Sylvian, but always only as complementary spices in the flavour mix, never as direct references as such, and always sounding modern as much as it does classic. There are songs that are arena-sized – many of them – and others that sound more suited to a contemporary concert hall, but there’s no hard divide between the two, and it would be easy to imagine a set constructed around this album for either environment.
It also sounds like several million dollars: it’s mixed with a dazzling sense of the value of each detail, not for instant punch but to build worlds you’ll want to enter. If you’re not in the mood it can be demanding, emotionally and intellectually, to the point of hard work – but then you’ll come back to it another time and that time spent will be more rewarded as more detail reveals itself. It can be easy to be downhearted about the exploitative modern industry and imagine it only rewards a few ultra-focused megastars – but this is a salutary reminder that behind the Drakes and Swifts, there are real deal artists out there building glorious catalogues of music for the ages.
Listen to "Clean Heart":
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