Even the saddest break-up albums offer an implicit happy ending: Time passes, hearts heal and life goes on. Singer-songwriter Mike Hadreas, however, details the type of wounds that aren't necessarily remedied by time. On Learning, his soft-toned, piano-laden debut album as Perfume Genius, the twenty-something recovering drug addict sings of the people who violated him and primed his path of self-destructionusually in a timid, shell-shocked voice that tells more of the story than his sparse lyrics.
Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart writes about similar themes with an almost violent, vengeful anger, but Hadreas isn't nearly so confrontational. A good victim until the end, he offers nothing but sympathies, pardons and well wishes to his abusers. On the album's most direct song, “Mr. Petersen,” he eulogizes the troubled high-school teacher who seduced him with torrid notes and pot. “He made me a tape of Joy Division,” Hadreas sings, “he told me there was part of him missing.” Hadreas forgives the grown man who crossed so many lines and passed his problems onto a 16-year-old kid. “I know you weren't ready to go,” he sings of the teacher's suicide, “I hope there's room for you up above, or down below.”
Learning's other character sketches aren't nearly as specific, but they almost all imply similar breaches of boundaries, most of which Hadreas excuses or dismisses, even though they collectively explain how Hadreas' life went so awry. The album is a trenchant account of the abuse cycle made even more tragic by the singer's consistently sweet, almost naively forgiving tone. He hopes, begs and possibly even prays that everything will work out for the best for everybody else, even as his frail, disquiet quiver suggests he may never completely overcome the traumas some of them caused.
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