Perfume Genius: Put Your Back N 2 It

- Perfume Genius is the stage moniker of Mike Hadreas, you might have heard Learning, his debut record for Matador, back in 2010. That one was kind of an enormous turn around for the young guy. After a trememdously, emotionally damaging time in his life he moved back in with his mother. While there he recorded a bunch of songs with just his very quiet voice, a piano and a lot of reverb and put all his pain and desolation into them. He sent this very personal record off to Matador, but I don't know if he expected anything to come of it; when Matador signed him they had to master the album off the mp3s they'd been sent since Hadreas had disposed of the original recordings. It's easy to understand why they chose to release it, most people's bedroom moaning about personal pain is about as artistically intriguing as the shopping channel, but Perfume Genius managed to gild his with a stark beauty. You can definitely hear the same thing at work on the rather curiously titled Put Your Back N 2 It, but to write it off as just another confessional record would be unfair. The songs here are much more expansive - and if Mike still sounds depressed, it's about pain that is being worked with to go somewhere better. The first song on the album, AWOL Marine, is actually rather deceptive, featuring the tinny productions on just piano and vocal amid an increasingly powerful wash of synth noise, Hadreas sings barely audibly "Turn towards the camera..." before everything opens into the completely different sound of Normal Song. For a start there's a guitar strumming away, that's new and you'll hear a lot more unexpected instrumentation before the end of the album, the production's is also a world fuller and warmer and it matches the lyrics - a bittersweet tearjerker about facing the world's pain and misunderstanding together: "No secret / No matter how nasty / Can poison your voice / Or keep you from joy". Listening to the following number, No Tear, you can hear Hadreas' voice becoming more confident too. When he gives it a bit of oomph it comes out with a quivering vibrato that sounds a bit like Anthony Hegarty. Hadreas has previously compared his own voice to that of an 'elf tranny', but I guess if you're going to sound like one, Anthony Hegarty would be the one you'd want to choose. It is interesting to note that Mike is openly gay, he actually had a little bit of a problem with Youtube recently banning a promo for this new album because it featured some man on man affection - bad Youtube, bad. If Perfume Genius is suffering as a result it is less and less obvious on the record. Put Your Back N 2 It might still be full of yesterday's sadness, but there's an undercurrent of enjoyment of the present and a great deal of hope for tomorrow. It is both musically and thematically a big step forward for Mike Hadreas and one that is a pleasure to listen to.

Chris Cobcroft.