Send "Perfume Genius " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 The promotional materials for Perfume Genius' Learning show the project's sole member, 26-year-old Seattle resident Mike Hadreas, shirtless and with a black eye. It's as evocative an image as the Strokes wearing leather jackets and Velvet Underground t-shirts or Animal Collective wearing tribal masks. The songs on Hadreas' full-length debut are eviscerating and naked, with heartbreaking sentiments and bruised characterizations delivered in a voice that ranges from an ethereal croon to a slightly cracked warble. The production value is lo-fi, although not in a staticky, antagonistic way. Instead, the crude recording adds intimacy, to the point where you can hear Hadreas' feet on the pedals of the piano that plays a central role in many of his songs. This music sounds personal.On paper, Perfume Genius would seem to cater to a small niché, but Hadreas has an innate gift for melody that ups the accessibility considerably. Many of these understated songs turn out to be surprisingly persistent earworms, with tunes that are refreshingly uncluttered. The song structures of cuts like "Learning", "Mr. Petersen", and "Write to Your Brother" mostly sticking to short melodic sequences that slowly work their way into your headspace. This simplicity puts greater focus on Hadreas' lyrics, and they deserve the attention. He's tackling emotionally fraught topics here-- the struggle to gain acceptance from loved ones, suicide, molestation, substance abuse, and questionable relationships with figures of authority, to name a few. "Write to Your Brother" addresses a person named Mary to act upon the titular command, reminding her to tell him, "Mom treats you like a lover/ That you have to hide all the mouthwash from her." "Mr. Peterson", the album's most heartbreakingly direct cut, concerns a teenager's sexual relationship with a teacher, ending with a grisly death. Hadreas has a knack for detail that recalls Sufjan Stevens' more intimate and non-big-tent moments, and he knows how to tell a story. One comes away from "When" remembering "the line of the trees/ Above the end of the street," as a mother steps into her yard "holding her daughter." It's the small things that stand out: the Joy Division mixtape in "Mr. Peterson", the pressed flower concealed within a letter in "Write to Your Brother", the paycheck held by the about-to-vanish titular subject in "Perry". These songs touch on a range of emotions, but the fine details make them hit harder....full text |
| Bbc |
| To attract attention in a crowded marketplace, the most common practice is to make a lot of noise. In the music industry, this means as much pre-release hype as possible. It’s long been a predictable process – even the outsider can see that if Band X is being raved about rapturously in January, their June-released record is likely to find favour in those same right places. Which is why albums like The xx’s debut of last year stand out so brilliantly. It caught the listener unaware without jumping them, creeping into the conscious over the course of several plays. Sure, there was support in the press; but it didn’t shoot into the public sphere immediately, and steady exposure has given it a long life few could have truthfully foreseen. It has, quietly, become something of a modern classic. Which brings us to Perfume Genius, aka Seattle-based solo artist Mike Hadreas. Learning, his debut album, sounds nothing like the work of The xx, but operates on a similar level of stealth, its slight arrangements – often just piano and Sufjan Stevens-echoing vocals – initially offering little to latch onto, but proving incredibly moving when given the time to sink deep inside. And here they bury their heads, taking refuge from the ills that have informed them. This is a sad record, but one where pain is articulated with an acute beauty that glosses somewhat over emotional cracks, mercifully without such heavy handedness that compelling catharsis can’t take flight. It is staggeringly sparse and haunting, and immediate replays are regularly required to process further what’s just been heard, to (try to) make sense of a lyric seemingly thrown away in the context of the whole piece. On Mr. Petersen, for example, a song about a teacher Hadreas seems to have had a relationship with: “He made me a tape of Joy Division / He told me there was part of him missing / When I was 16… He jumped off a building.” It’s a shocker, a reveal that is as crushing of image as it is damaged of delivery....full text |
| Shout4music |
| I must be missing something. This is the type of record I should normally adore. It’s slowcore. It’s personal confessional. It’s lo-fi, recorded on a home studio, with no bells or whistles. It fits right into the Low / Jeff Lewis / Daniel Johnston bracket of music that I usually advocate. However I can’t shake that it sounds like 11 takes on Neil Young’s ‘Philadelphia‘, recorded through a sock. Underwater. Perfume Genius (aka solo artist Mike Hadreas – it’s a one-man album) wrote this LP in his mother’s house in the suburbs, having moved away from NYC to deal with addiction / abuse demons, and consists of almost unbearably sparse piano arrangements married to Hadreas’ Wayne Coyne-like falsetto. This undeniably oomphs the catharsis, however the melodies may be too fragile to hold this – it’s difficult to distinguish some of the tracks from each other, notably ‘Learning’ and ‘Mr.Petersen’. ‘Gay Angels’ and ‘No Problem’ differentiate themselves only by switching to a synth. I’ve no doubt this is a record Hadreas needed to make, and I’ve no doubt that its almost unremitting bleakness will win it a place deep in the soul of those who warm to it. But try as I might, I just can’t....full text |
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