★★★★★
In my opinion January is the worst month of the year; the holidays are over, it is cold as Fuck and there is nothing to look forward to for a long, long time. It's no wonder why I gravitate to sad and gloomy albums during this shitty time of year. This January I have become addicted to Perfume Genius' tear jerker Put Your Back N 2 It and I can assure you that the music is more beautiful than the album title...
- www.syffal.com
2013-04-02
★★★★★
Mike Hadreas is very adept at making others uncomfortable. While his first album was a collection of wildly detailed stories about normal people doing terrible things to scrape by, his first video for his latest release drew a hail of criticism from some corners of the media. Not a single person got hurt nor genital was shown during the video...
- www.punknews.org
2012-05-31
★★★★★
The album artwork for Perfume Genius' debut album Learning was a self-portrait with the face blotted out. The cover shot for new album Put Your Back N 2 It has a similar masking effect, an act that both highlights and censors, but it's a group portrait and the smear is a shared one. It retains the alienation and uneasiness, but the paint covering two male faces suggests a connection, perhaps a sexual union...
- www.beat.com.au
2012-03-22
★★★★★
Let's take a minute to consider the intense emotional revelation of the first 10 minutes of Perfume Genius' debut record Learning. A twinkling, iPhone-ad piano introduced with a needling "no one will answer your prayers till you take off that dress," then a haunted allegory of a deeply confused high school teacher trading weed for sexual favors before casting himself off the top of a building...
- www.prefixmag.com
2012-03-08
★★★★★
Seattle's Mike Hadreas made his debut as Perfume Genius in 2010, on a lauded album - Learning - which seemed to function primarily as a channel for his earlier life's despair. This follow-up mostly continues in the same stratum; the twelve confessional songs are leanly structured around demure guitar and piano parts...
- music.thedigitalfix.com
2012-03-07
★★★★★
The title of Perfume Genius' second album may suggest exertion, and the first sound you hear when you listen to it is a deep, labored breath, but the music's execution and emotional impact feel more like letting go. Lovely, at times heart-wrenching, and musically fragile to the point of shattering, the record plays like a series of themes serving as lifetime codas, even when the lyrics suggest otherwise...
- www.undertheradarmag.com
2012-03-06
★★★★★
How do we deal with personal trauma? After it's over, what comes next? These are some of the Big Questions Seattle singer/songwriter Mike Hadreas addresses on his second album as Perfume Genius. Put Your Back N 2 It follows Hadreas' overlooked 2010 debut, Learning, and it feels like a proper sequel to that album's suite of dysfunction and devastation...
- pitchfork.com
2012-03-06
★★★★★
Sometimes the personal can't help but be political, when the way you choose to express yourself ends up taking a social stance, whether you mean it to or not. That's one way to describe what Perfume Genius's Mike Hadreas faces up to when making music, as the kind of artist who transforms his most private and intimate reflections into something much more...
- www.popmatters.com
2012-03-06
★★★★★
In the last several years, Seattle has come considerably closer to exorcising the ghosts of grunge and post-grunge, as distinct strains of Pacific Northwest folk and hip-hop have begun to find international audiences by way of the populist successes of artists like Fleet Foxes, the Head and the Heart, and Macklemore, among many others. Though other bands in the city and its surrounding areas are by no means denying its existence (for evidence of this, note that local band M...
- www.cokemachineglow.com
2012-03-06
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