Words by Josh Jones
This is the first album I listened to this year that made me go WOAH! It made my ears stop what they were doing and stare solely at the noise from the speakers. Then it made me go cold and shivery all over.
Thank you Perfume Genius.
Learning makes you feel like you’re in the end credits of the best film of your life – probably driving away into the mid-west in a convertible after an hour and a half of emotional torment where the viewer has been sitting in the cinema watching you with gritted teeth, arse clenched and really close to panic as they’ve gone through your rollercoaster ride, watching you get kicked out of home, make out with your hot friend, scream and shout, break up, break down, drink, drug, cry, cry harder, laugh, gaze at the stars, stare at the sun, buy an ice-cream and sit in a park in a cloud of melancholy. The film that misses Sundance, but gets picked up after someone watches it by accident and then passes it round all of your friends ’til you end up using quotes from it at parties.
This album is fraught and tense and uplifting and soaring and depraved and depressed and shirtless and dirty. Want to know which tracks are the best? “Look Out, Look Out” is fucking amazing, and “Mr Peterson”, which immediately follows and was released earlier this year, bangs out a more upbeat piano accompanying a very dark subject matter, while penultimate track “Perry” soars miles above your head before plunging into a mixed up chaotic scream before “Never Did” ends your experience perfectly.
It’s like that 4am feeling when you’re walking home in the summer after a party and the air seems to have been diluted a bit and all the colours are a bit thin, because your serotonin has evaporated and you’re thinking about stuff. REALLY thinking about stuff, but you forget what you were just thinking about and then think about something else. When you get into bed but every time you shut your eyes your mind bursts into buzzing life and you solve all .your problems, then come up with a hundred new ones, but you don’t write any of it down so in the end you spin around in a cycle.
This album is awesome.
(Organ/Turnstile 2010)
