Perfume Genius – Put Your Back N 2 It

Perfume Genius - Put Your Back N 2 It

By Greg Salter

Back in 2010, Learning – Mike Hadreas’ first record as Perfume Genius – was disarming in its honesty, simplicity and emotional content. The ten short songs were often distant and quiet, though the brutal, frank imagery of Hadreas’ lyrics spoke volumes – about self-destruction and destruction at the hands of others, and about survival. Learning emerged after Hadreas had given up drink and drugs and stood as something as a testament to survival – you felt like you were hearing a life story after the event, and the album was often as absorbing and as uncomfortable a listen as you might expect. Watching Hadreas perform those songs live was akin to watching someone relive that past, while also becoming aware of the possibilities of a future, born out of this music.

Put Your Back N 2 It builds on Learning, lyrically and musically. Hadreas is still concened with survival, though he’s looking up, beyond himself, to friends and relatives surrounding him – it’s an album about family and communities, ties that reach across the most horrific events and everyday crap, and, against all odds, are strengthened. While the songs remain short and slight, Hadreas has extended his sonic palette, working more instruments and extra voices into certain songs rather than relying on just his piano (though a few simple piano ballads do remain).

So if Hadreas sounded like he was barely surviving on Learning, then Put Your Back N 2 It finds him comforting others – “No memory/No matter how sad/And no violence/No matter how bad/Can darken the heart/Or tear it apart”, he sings on ‘Normal Song’ over a gently strummed acoustic guitar. Similarly, ‘No Tear’ is a show of strength in the face of everything collapsing, literally: “Roof comes down/And you leave me with nothing/I will shed no tear” – military percussion rumbles in the background and other voices join in before leaving Hadreas on his own again. Meanwhile, ‘Dark Parts’ explicitly addresses his mother – it’s a tender though unflinching portrait of familial trauma but also resilience, and lines like “But he’ll never break you, baby” and Hadreas’ wordless “oh oh oh”s are almost unbearably poignant.

I think this is one of the strengths of Hadreas’ music – he remains resolutely unafraid to confront particularly difficult subject matter, courageous in the face of darkness and unwilling to censor himself. So ‘Awol Marine’ paints a minimal portrait of addiction before disappearing into noise and ‘Take Me Home’, a sonically-rich, immediately appealing bar room ballad, reveals itself to be about both prostitution and an all-encompassing relationship. For Hadreas, the lines between ecstasy and despair seem almost non-existent. ‘Hood’ warns a lover of inner darkness – “You would never call me baby/If you knew the truth”.

There are also songs here that find Hadreas addressing his sexuality. The stately ‘All Waters’ quietly builds to a declaration about openness and devotion that’s as simple and powerful as you’re likely to hear, while pinpointing an anxiety that he feels about showing his own boyfriend affection in public that straight people don’t have to confront: “When I can take your hand/On any crowded street/And hold you close to me/With no hesitating”. Meanwhile, the album’s title track is a simple gay love song, about sex in one sense but also about fidelity – the two are, happily, inseparable as Hadreas’ boyfriend Alan Wyffels quietly harmonises with him.

In an interview (with GQ of all publications), Mike Hadreas spoke about the purpose behind his music, which sums up incredibly succinctly what I’ve been trying to convey over the last five paragraphs: “my purpose would be to take something that was originally shameful, secret and made you feel gross about yourself and to inject some kind of tenderness and healing into it”. Put Your Back N 2 It feels like a triumph of emotional honesty conveyed in a collection of simple though melodically rich songs – a recorded testament to ways in which the past can always be faced not as something to torment or to pull you back, but as something to build on and renew, towards some kind of future.

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