reviews / 2010

PERFUME GENIUS - Learning

Name: PERFUME GENIUS – Learning
Item: Learning
Rating: 6
Author: Francesco Nunziata

2010 (Matador)

songwriter

by Francesco Nunziata

Mike Hadreas is a young twenty-six-year-old singer-songwriter from Seattle, and “Learning” is his debut album, containing ten tracks for a scant twenty-nine minutes of music.

Skeletal music, steeped in boundless sadness and overwrought intimacy. These songs are true confessions, and even if more than once they seem to suffer a bit too much from the monochromatic nature of the inspiration behind them, I think they can safely be regarded as the very first cries of an artist who might (better use the conditional, you never know!) eventually arrive at more satisfying results. The voice, bare and fragile, appears in the title track, getting lost amid echoes and reverb, while the piano skips along mournfully and, within the folds of memory, recollections of relationships more or less real crumble before our eyes, complete with swapped Joy Division mixtapes… (“Mr. Peterson”).

Even with scant resources at his disposal, Hadreas still manages to make his stories solemn and arcane (“Look Out, Look Out” and, even more so, “Gay Angels”, where the singing feels like the last exhalation of a life suspended over a chasm of uncertainty), painfully minimalist (“Write To Your Brother”), overtaken by a sweet, aching melancholy and set within a quasi-symphonic vertigo (“No Problem”). A fiercely private kind of songwriting with nothing but the abyss standing behind it (“Never Did”).

One to watch.

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14/07/2010

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Francesco Nunziata, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition