Perfume Genius
BIOGRAPHY
You’ll all have people who’ve tried to convince you that they went a little off the rails during their teenage years, but something about the mythology building up around Seattle’s Michael Hadreas, aka Perfume Genius, suggests that he went a little crazier than even the most ‘out there’ stories of your wildest friends. Having spent a frustrated, pent up and by all accounts generally very dark adolescence in New York, he moved to the suburbs to be with his mother and her piano. He’d taken lessons on the ol’ Joanna from the ages of 7 to 15, but never learnt to read music, or compose (“my teacher eventually gave up on me and taught me all the pieces by ear and having me put my hands over hers while she played”, he told The Line Of Best Fit). Still, over the course of a year, he’d written Learning – the ten track debut as Perfume Genius that gets a UK release this week.
Michael is 26, still lives with his mother, and sells furniture for a living, which seems to keep him busy enough. (“Mixed paint for a guy yesterday at work and the color was called "Baby Smile" which was this really off-putting yellow. Creepy Tones 2010” – went one Twitter update). But things for Perfume Genius are about to get a lot busier. Since setting up a MySpace profile in late 2008, releasing a few fittingly creepy homemade videos for his songs on his YouTube profile and having Los Campesinos! lose their composure over how good these so-delicate-they’re-almost-not-there songs are, people seem to have been going rather loopy for the guy.
A single, ‘Mr. Peterson’ (available for free download below) was released on Transparent Records in March (home of Washed Out and Active Child), and quite rightly, drew a lot of attention. The story of a love affair between an impressionable student and his suicidal teacher, lines like “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...” were the kind of uncomfortably heartbreaking lyrics to which you kinda just had to pay attention. The Guardian quite rightly pointed out that the song “sketched the most sympathetic, human portrait of a paedophile since the character of Bill Maplewood in Todd Solondz's film Happiness.” If that sounds like heavy going... well, the whole record is really, really heavy going - despite being only ten tracks and less than half an hour long.
Though it can seem impenetrably bleak on first listen, there is a feeling of hope (or at least resignation offered with further eloquence) that develops throughout Learning. Perhaps this is born out of the fact that the album is sequenced chronologically, with the first song being the first one Hadreas ever wrote, and the following songs all appearing in order of when they were written too. Also, the few interviewers who’ve spoken to him seem to agree that Hadreas is a funny, warm and forthcoming kinda guy – it’s not unlikely that there’s some humour we’re missing, buried beneath the dark eye makeup and bruises that characterise his almost all topless press shots. “Claire Danes' vagina has its own sketchbook and looks like a reusable shopping tote filled with mixed greens”, is, after all, one of my favourite things he ever used Twitter to reveal about his curious little mind.
FREE DOWNLOAD:
We’re delighted to be able to offer a free download of the title track from Perfume Genius’s debut album – have a listen to ‘Learning’ HERE.
TOUR DATES:
These promise to be pretty intense, intimate little occasions – not least because Perfume Genius has barely played live yet.
09/07/10 Berlin, Private Club
13/07/10 London, Hoxton Hall
20/07/10 New York, 92Y Tribec
23/07/10 New York, Glasslands
LINKS
MySpace
Twitter
Facebook
Last.FM
Turnstile Records
VIDEOS:
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