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By John Norris

Different parts of you may ache – the heart, and yes, maybe even the stomach – when listen to Learning, the brutally confessional and sometimes tragic debut album from Perfume Genius, released in June. But as you’ll see on this week’s Face Time, Mike Hadreas, the guy behind this musical journal that delves into abuse, addiction, suicide and more, is upbeat, charming, shy and still getting used to all the attention. That attention and love has only increased since Mike first began to post songs on MySpace and YouTube two years ago, accompanied on by fascinatingly odd homemade videos, which as he tells us were in some cases in fact fetish videos he had found on line. The songs – born of new found sobriety following several hard partying years in New York – might have been sad, even harrowing to some, but Hadreas delivers them in a tone of matter-of-fact, even compassionate reminiscence, leaving the judgments, if you must, up to you. As he tell us on Face Time, opening oneself up is one thing, but being maudlin or too ‘angsty’ has never interested him.

The most talked about songs on Learning have naturally been the most eyebrow-raising ones: “Never Did”, which might be about God, or about sexual abuse;  “Perry” and “Write to Your Brother”, addressing friends in dire straits; and the single “Mr. Peterson”, about the relationship between a sixteen year old student and his troubled teacher. You’ll hear that song on Face Time, in a performance shot this summer in Seattle, along with the more recent, exquisitely delicate “Your Drum”, and its video that Mike created using found Russian animation.

Mike Hadreas has been through it, as they say, and found a lot of light at the end of what at times was a pretty dark tunnel. As such, he has a definite perspective on the recent spate of gay teens bullied to the point of suicide, which he shares with Noisevox. Though he wonders like many of us why it takes a high concentration of such incidents to get the media to focus on a problem that has gone on for generations, he echoes what many have said, that it does "get better." Never one to sugarcoat, he adds “It can get worse too, but it definitely gets better.”

It doesn’t get a lot better than Perfume Genius, our guest this week on Noisevox’s Face Time.   

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