There’s something about Ugly Season’s cover art that makes it more than just a nice picture. Mark Hadreas’s voice is focused inside his body- emotion and physical movements, his war with Crohn’s illness and the wonderful fantasies of residing as a lgbtq guy and after his exit from fleshy fleshly desires and sadness on 2017’s No Shape, Don’t See, or I Will, noticing him holding solo, staring at the screen on his magnificent 2020 epic Set My Heart on Fire Immediately, it felt like a moment of a turning point, Hadreas embraced the joys and frustrations of the human and produced an album that took them all into consideration to create his greatest, comfortable and grand album to date. Good news, people!, as Ugly Season swipes a photo of him into a churning drawing of colors, pastels and chocolate, his sight nonetheless penetrating through it all, it seems something else suggests what he’s doing here, an album lower attached to the material universe or more to the kinds of infinite, Soul Holy composers of history lgbtq pioneers for Julius Eastman and Arthur Russell. The arising song is nothing short of deep.
With just a bunch of all other bassists assisting Hadreas offer this music to living – Alan Wyffels donates peripherals, mellophone, bells and tones; Rob Moose, composing string arrangements; quirky Sam Gendel; Matt Chamberlain whistling; Blake Mills playing almost any tool under the heat – the close composers of Ugly Season are amplified by how tightly coiled and eerie they experience. Protect two of Hadreas ‘2019 tracks, Pop Song and Eye in the Wall, finding their way onto the album, the entirety of Ugly Season has been constituted of black, dark Western genre and room items pushed through a 6×10 inch cave entrance, black and dark so far indescribably wonderful and full of superb information around every twist. Lineup Just a Room lets you in with a strong attack, eerie robots that pillow his tone in skin-tearing ambient sounds, Hadreas’ smooth and soft chanting like the last speech of someone being sucked by the mouth of a seagull. Once he reaches the bottom, it seems like everything is potential: Pop Song’s sparkle synthesizers tremble for luminous bugs as Hadreas’ crystal mellifluous verse and symphony of gender and gay relationships in distorted ways, I love the words “Harvest the pit” “Sharpen the pulley” – and the previous Teeth’s recurring hammer rhythmic folds a smooth online inside his simple lyricism, offering all the areas to focus on his speech before showing how handful he likes to straighten you in. Often, he completely ignores lyricism, like on the belly weirdo Scherzo, it sets the album’s multiple halves apart a nervous piano piece and it helps set the tone for Ugly Season’s extra extreme second side, or on the rachis concluding Cenote in which acoustic layerings inside Hadreas’ smooth, delicate musicianship and it makes a peaceful, nearly surreal nook where the disappointment he performs through the album’s 10 songs seems to dissipate, at least for a present. Hadreas’s job when he started in his late twenties always focused around pop, and yet as he began experimenting with more of skin and atmospherics in the long mid-2010s, but with Ugly Season he has to let go because of it and have protection, his song talking completely to itself as he refuses to give you anything except his briefest feelings.
Despite the impenetrableness of the song and its definition, it could indicate, Ugly Season has the same level of depth and boatloads of affection pumped into it all that Hadreas’s past songs have. Tho it is higher enclosed than before, th here’s neither rejecting nor rejecting how thrilling and tonally brilliant the seven-minute Herem is, clipped chord robots clash with Hadreas’s glistening lyrics and Wyffels’ soft horn and synth attempting to play, only the second song on Ugly Season – one of its greatest and deepest. It’s modular, in part, and it Hadreas uses to his edge throughout, where the warm team elegance of Eye in the Wall, with its rolling four-on-the-floor and groovy synthesizers and it conveys the night hours of a club found at the bottom of a bay window, could fit perfectly there between the dub-infused title track and production room music fantasy Photograph. And feel great subdirectories okay at that location. Although he prefers the more innovative side of his job in “Ugly Season”, His eye for detail and skill for special music composers hasn’t remained forgotten in the combination, Hellbent’s spine-chilling synthesizers and influenced guitars seem eerily similar to the noise of his 2020 Nothing At All with its uproarious production, and now bent and bowed into an entirely new form. Nothing is always true here, and contemplating, so he authored such music to attain Kate Wallich’s “The Sun Still Burns Here”, a mesmerizing experience, sex-positive and creative recital, this is the kind of confusion and formlessness that makes the music makes sense. This is a song and it asks you to describe its most important parts, what sticks out to you and what things are highlighted at any given moment. It’s amazingly absorbing, in a way few more songs are, not always creating an unique global for the song to present in, but giving you the chance to know its workings and distortion, unmoored reasoning.
Now in the second half of his creative travels, Mike Hadreas hasn’t forgotten any of these bright and glowing things, such eleven beautiful songs create a fantastic and completely new comment with the now 40 year vintage songwriter. Mike Hadreas’ jobs have always been on the fringes of music, but he eliminates himself completely after that space with Ugly Season, I’m going to turn from a gothic music storyteller into a nervous one, nervous magician, showcasing everything that’s been waiting in the edges of his noise in fullscreen, offering a micrograph look at all the little information and it offered his previous work that kind of hero and appearance. He gives out the same kindness and sentimental frequency and it creates his captivating history, but has the song say narrative instead of his tone, rejecting his standard clear songwriting for angle and creative narration and it gets you involved, without saying absolutely nothing. Ugly Season leaves you more within wonder than ever with Hadreas ‘art’, the once in a lifetime genius who examines himself and the global inside him with a meticulous focus and doesn’t miss a single information, music as his planning and feelings as his lead. Now, he makes a noise that would be soothing, hazy, and pressing, Ugly Season demonstrates he can present on the upside of that much, very.
