Perfume Genius
Learning

THE REVIEW

"No one will hear your prayers until you'll take off that dress.
No one will hear you crying, until you'll take your last breath"

"Learning" is the whisper of clouds tinged pink after a tempestuous storm: it still retains its psychic and physical violence, its disturbed destructive tone, and its despair, but it evolves into those pastel colors that whirl between lilac and blue, and that whispered grace that cracks the ribs, like the gaze of your very first love. An album of small whispered violences in the void, let them slip into the ecstasy of the unconscious.

An album shaped by angelic sensations, of wonderful desolate lands choked by sighs and let sink into the snow ("Gay Angels", a wonderful angelic anthem that recalls early Sigur Ròs, ethereal and rarefied, remains imprinted in the flesh and drags you forcefully into the spirals that are created in the universe). But the universe of Perfume Genius, this talented young man able to touch the soul as even Antony can't, is also dirty, desperate, feeble, broken (the splendid "You Won't B'Here", a song of a minute and a half that makes you replay it practically in a loop, is able to instill for a moment a traumatic yet pleasant melancholy) and he doesn't need long tails or ten-minute songs to express discomfort, absence, carnality. It is ten pieces and twenty-eight minutes of perversely erotic, indelible, disorienting music.

A sanguine album, a small masterpiece that rises on immense castles of paper, clouds of cotton candy and faded rainbows. A universe that materializes with the title track, as beautiful as it is alienating, guiding the listener by the hand towards the darkest infernal abyss, but it does so with shyness. It takes you to the edge, but doesn't push you down, preferring to leave you teetering between hope and sadness. It will be by the end of the last song that it will be up to the listener to decide whether to jump or not, to restart the sonic journey and continually lose oneself again.

A clear talent, that will make a name for itself or that might already stop here, among these ten songs born from the soul and not from instruments. Suffered, ecstatic, immense. The sweet swan song of our mediocrity.