“Half of my entire life is gone,” Mike Hadreas sighed on the opening of Fragrance Genius’ fifth album, the high-water mark Set My Coronary heart on Fireplace Instantly. Although that will sound like an expression of remorse, Hadreas sang it with a sort of guarded optimism—opening a door right into a document that gleefully documented life’s contradictions by means of odes to connections to the self and others.
On Glory, Fragrance Genius’ newest, Haderas is as soon as once more mulling the grand arc of his existence. He ponders “my whole life…” on “No Entrance Enamel” earlier than pausing. Then, he confesses: “It’s high quality.” On the nervy, agoraphobic “It’s a Mirror,” he admits, “My entire life is/Open simply exterior the door.” He’s remoted, caught inside his personal agonizing thought patterns, and he is aware of one thing extra interesting—immensely gratifying, even—is proper there. However he isn’t certain he can attain it.
Glory traffics in these moments of desperation and alienation, themes that aren’t completely new territory for Hadreas. A lot of the album was written throughout COVID lockdown, the pressured retreat compelling Hadreas to confront the best way private baggage doesn’t inevitably recede with age. “Being out on the earth is actually terrifying to me,” he defined to The Guardian. “I used to be attempting to confront a variety of that—like how do I have interaction, how do I be inside my relationships, inside the world, part of issues extra, despite the fact that I’m scared?” We’re now 5 years out from the beginning of that collective claustrophobia, when many people have been pressured into uncomfortably shut quarters with our personal psyches, and our present second doesn’t lack for artwork about its results. Fortunately, Glory doesn’t take the pandemic as its topic. As a substitute, it brings a brand new perspective to themes which have lengthy tugged at Hadreas: anxiousness, grief, disconnection. The feeling of being trapped inside one’s personal thoughts, wanting desperately to shed one’s immaturity and re-engage extra generously with the world: That is, sadly, a timeless concern, and right here, Hadreas renders it within the detailed, moody technicolor he’s mastered.
Glory is wealthy with magnificence, however the band—Hadreas; longtime accomplice Alan Wyfells; producer Blake Mills; and drummers Tim Carr and Jim Keltner, bassist Pat Kelly, and guitarists Meg Duffy and Greg Uhlmann—twists it simply sufficient to let in flashes of the unusual and idiosyncratic. An insistent, buzzing synth interrupts the transcendence of “Left for Tomorrow”; “Clear Coronary heart” balances twitchy percussion and incandescent keys; “In a Row” thrums mischievously. A 3rd of the best way by means of “No Entrance Enamel,” the music drops its restrained magnificence and turns into a full-band thrash; later, it repeats that trick once more, the band fading out and leaving solely Aldous Harding’s beautiful voice earlier than swerving again to strummed guitars and an eerie swirl of synths. Its whiplash is scrumptious, like a rollercoaster the place the amazement of the height is simply matched by the fun of seeing the universe turned upside-down a second later.
