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Rating: I had loved "Learning," the debut album by Perfume Genius.
Beyond the ambiguous personality of this young, effeminate guy with more than one sociological issue, afflicted by melancholy and a cursed spirit, by painful sexuality and immense sensitivity, his music was truly heart-touching. That album, divided into ten sketches more than songs, managed to escape from a dusty room to tear at your flesh.
It spoke of endless love, reduced to a puff of weed in a truck and a skipping Joy Division tape, reduced to a suicide ("Mr. Peterson"), it told of how much absence hurt ("You Won't Be Here") and did so by whispering in your ear, filling you with sweetness. Him, with his chest perpetually bare and his sweet face marked by violence. At the piano. With his heart thrown to the ground, trampled, violated under the incessant clatter of keys, in songs that barely reached three minutes.
Now he is back. Having left the lo-fi behind to reach you better.
Perfume Genius continues to whisper, but he wants to be clear: to hurt you, to caress you, but leaving you suspended in pain. Halfway between Antony and Sigur Rós, yet not resembling either counterpart, the young man returns to speak to us of sex, violence, denied love, incomprehensibility, and silence. Still songs that touch the soul deeply, still that voice, that suffering progression of notes, those sketched waltzes that rave in the horror of life.
There is an abyss in this new album, and that abyss is called "All Waters": a masterpiece contained in just under two minutes. A cascade of sounds from beyond that crash into the here, the present, within the four walls of a house.
A cozy and pretty house, a house with a little garden and walls stained with blood. You have a dog wagging its tail, a cat purring, but there's too much silence. You lock yourself in the closet and travel. Travel between a powerful romantic ballad like "Hood" and the accentuated electronics of "Floating Spit."
Soap bubbles that don't burst. Black bruises on the skin. These songs are spiders climbing the walls, crawling on the floor, and stinging you mercilessly. They do so gently, but then they kill you. It hardly matters if, often, they end up being songs so simple they seem almost childish ("Sister Song"), because this album manages to make simplicity painful, bloody, without redemption.
Take it. Suffer.
Because even if it's pure masochism, albums like this are not forgotten.
Perfume Genius is back.
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