Roberta Flack's new Let It Be: Roberta Flack Sings the Beatles (RAS/Sony Records) and her recent show at The Venue were two big head-scratchers.
Granted, it was nice to see her again, but after these two offerings it may have been better to remember her from the past. The first imponderable is why do a Beatles cover album at all. It's been 42 years since the band broke up but even before that, their songbook had been extensively covered. So what could Flack bring to The Beatles' music that hadn't been covered by everyone from Alice Cooper to Lena Horne? Not much, actually.
Her patient reading of George Harrison's "Isn't It A Pity" is the only gem here and, as expected, Flack sang it with deliberate patience, irony and care. But another deliberate, patient, and careful reading of "Hey Jude" by anyone is pretty much uncalled for.
If the new album seems unnecessary, her show did her no favors—or rather, she did herself no favors. The first red flag of the evening was a slightly accelerated "Killing Me Softly with his Song," one of two of Flack's massive hits that shaped pop music in the '70s by blurring folk, pop and jazz. In this setting, the song's drama evaporated and it came off as shockingly uninvolving—something that the original certainly wasn't.
Her reading of "Isn't It A Pity," "Reverend Lee" and Katrice Barnes' "Say No" were the evening's highlights, in as much as Flack gave them her full attention. What really became distracting was Flack's laziness as a performer. Although she spent most of the evening seated at a grand piano she hardly played, resting her fingers on the keyboard while her band's second pianist tinkled away all night. (From where I was sitting I could see her hands clearly.) The same went for her back-up vocalists, who got big solo spots, as well as her horn man. It almost didn't seem to matter that Flack was there at all. The show ended with her first huge hit, "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face," which met the same fate as "Killing Me Softly": accelerated, uninvolving, and indifferent. If Flack projected an attitude that her audience was blessed to hear her phone it in, she needn't have bothered.
"Phoning it in" is something Mike Hadreas, aka Perfume Genius, certainly couldn't be accused of. If you doubt me, have a look at the controversial video for his single "Hood." There stands Hadreas looking pale and delicate, singing his heart out while the nearly nude, hirsute and uber-masculine gay-porn star Arpal Niklos brushes his hair and applies lipstick to him like a cherished china doll. It's a shocking video not because of the bare skin (which got it briefly yanked off YouTube) but because of its blunt sincerity.
Hearing Hadreas takes it even further; Perfume Genius has the voice of a sullied angel and his subjects traffic in pain, pain and more pain. The new Put Your Back In 2 It (Matador Records) continues what his debut, 2010's Learning, started. After a decade of turmoil (alcohol and drug addictions, accepting himself as gay and a dubious romantic relationship with one of his instructors), Hadreas funneled all that suffering into his music as a sort of therapy, although it doesn't sound like he got it entirely out of his system.
The haunting "Take Me Home" could be misinterpreted as a love song ("I'll be quiet for you ... like a child for you") until you realize the song is about turning tricks for drug money. But what makes the album so haunting, engaging and irresistible isn't the subject matter but Hadreas' effortless, complicated and angelic vocals as well as a production style that seems to work in the opposite direction. The entire album has that voice twirling like a feather in the wind buffered by ambient sounds, spare bass and enough echo to swallow the Queen Mary. "Dark Parts" is the only song here that is what it appears to be, a song where Hadreas proclaims his devotion by saying "I'll take the dark parts of your heart into my heart."
This isn't to say that Perfume Genius' recent show at Schuba's was a big old queer downer—far from it. The opener, Parenthetical Girls, got the sold-out room jumping; by the time Hadreas got behind his keyboard, he projected an embarrassed self-consciousness in the knowledge that his music was on the dour side. However, his audience came to hear him and he didn't disappoint. With spare accompaniment from boyfriend Alan Wyffels on keyboards and a friend introduced as Harris on guitar, the live setting gave the music a resonance that seeped into your pores.
What engrossed me was the look on Hadreas' face that betrayed that though he's clean, sober and in a happy same-sex relationship, he's still very much in touch with his past turmoil. Put Your Back In 2 It is a delicate, personal document about intimate things with a colossal sound and a powerful starkness. Better still, Perfume Genius—much like the dissimilar Diamond Rings—is a fresh face for queer music and a new era. Yeah, the album is a heartbreaker, but damn if it dosen't kill.
