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. On his first album, Hadreas tackled subjects such as molestation, substance abuse, suicide, the complications of inappropriate sexual relationships, and the struggle for acceptance from those you love. The morose subject matter and melodic simplicity of Learning's piano-based songs drew comparisons to indie-pop artists like Stephin Merritt and Casiotone for the Painfully Alone's Owen Ashworth. But Hadreas' ability to set a scene and convey detail, which brought to mind Sufjan Stevens circa Seven Swans, lent the songs extra force. There were moments of impressionistic, synth-smeared beauty on that first record, but the overriding sense of despair and hopelessness could be overwhelming. On Put Your Back N 2 It, there's a crack of light coming through the darkness.
Hadreas is still exploring the more harrowing corners of human behavior. "Dark Parts" details the abuse his mother suffered at the hands of her grandfather; opener "AWOL Marine" takes inspiration from a tape of homemade pornography that Hadreas viewed, in which one of the participants admits, camera still rolling, that he's just trying to get medication for his wife. "Floating Spit" also deals with drug addiction, "Take Me Home" explores prostitution in the context of the need to be loved, while "17" uses a metaphor of a body stuffed into a violin, covered in semen, and hung up on a fence to shine a light on corrosive self-loathing. So don't let the whimsical album title fool you: If you're looking for something low-key to vibe out to, you've come to the wrong place.
The "light" the album allows has to do with how Hadreas approaches the material. He has a brilliant feel for poetic imagery ("The hands of God were bigger than grandpa's eyes/ But still he broke the elastic on your waist," from "Dark Parts", is particularly haunting), but he's mostly moved away from storytelling to explore emotional themes at their most fundamental. Put Your Back N 2 It is an album about love-- what happens when we feel sheltered by it, how we fail to love ourselves and the people around us-- but amidst the heartache and bruised tenderness, there's hope, too. Hadreas sums it all up in the hollowed-out torch song "No Tear": "I will carry on with grace."
For all its violence, Back radiates warmth. Much of the beauty is due to the expanded instrumentation, from the swooning, countryish guitar bends of "Take Me Home" to the interspersed snare rolls on "No Tear". The brutal low fidelity of Learning is gone, replaced with clarity and sonic intimacy that, when paired with these rich songs, raises every hair on the back of your neck. The more expansive sound gives room for experimentation, from the submerged electronic percussion on "Floating Spit" (contributed by UK producer David Edwards, aka Minotaur Shock) to the robust and surprising full-band blast of "Hood". The latter, with its bloom-and-burst structure, is the perfect example of Hadreas' growth as a melodic songwriter, having moved well beyond the the functional melodies that marked Learning.
Many of these songs-- "Hood", "All Waters", "Take Me Home", "17"-- forego resolution and basically build tension and drop everything, in silence. Hadreas likes to steer clear of cathartic release, since in this world, there is no easy way out. On "All Waters", he begins singing in a low register and ends in his highest falsetto, as the song dissolves in wordless cries and frissons of far-away distortion. The song is a wish for a world where he and his boyfriend, Alan Wyffels (who also serves as his main musical collaborator), can hold hands in public without fear, and the lyrics ("When all waters still/ And flowers cover the earth") suggest that it's not going to happen any time soon.
Mike Hadreas is gay, and many of the songs here focus on the issues that young gay men face in their lives (he referred to "17" in a press release as "a gay suicide letter"), even as Back's sustained exploration of love and hate has resonance for anyone. There is a lot of him in this music, the minutiae obviously pulled from a single person's life and experiences. But the album is less about confession as a form of release and more about trying to bring something positive into the world. "I don't want it to seem like I've been through more than other people...", he says in promotional materials for the album. "Staying healthy can be more depressing and confusing than being fucked up. But I want to make music that's honest and hopeful."
With so much recent conversation about marriage equality and gay teen suicide, and with the predictable election-year demonization of homosexuality, Mike Hadreas' work is not only satisfying on a purely musical level, it also feels of-the-moment and above all necessary (it's so topical, he found himself in the middle of a standards-of-decency "family values" battle earlier this year between his label, Matador, and internet-media titans Google and YouTube). Independent music has woefully few artists dealing with these issues and asking difficult questions, and doing so in a context that never forgets about the importance of songwriting. That's a disappointment, but at least a handful of people like Hadreas are doing something about it.
