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Feb 17, 2012Within all the emotional turmoil, there's a lot for the listener to love.
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Feb 17, 2012Learning is a likewise bruised [as the album cover] and suggestive affair; of catharsis and rare, redemptive beauty, which ranks as one of the most uniquely endearing and quietly forceful debut albums of recent years.
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Feb 17, 2012Essentially the best debut album of 2010 thus far.
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Feb 17, 2012The songs on Hadreas' full-length debut are eviscerating and naked, with heartbreaking sentiments and bruised characterizations delivered in a voice that ranges from an ethereal croon to a slightly cracked warble.
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Feb 17, 2012Hadreas is one of the strongest songwriters we've seen develop this year, and Learning puts that on display beautifully.
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Feb 17, 2012His songs are delicate but strong, faint yet persistent, and have a deep, almost inexplicable emotional pull.
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Feb 17, 2012An unremittingly sad record, one that almost suffocates the listener with its own melancholia; and yet there's also something strangely inspirational in its 10 piano-led hymns to failing and trying again.
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Feb 17, 2012So sublime are these ten spectral soundtracks to the minutiae of a modern lover's tribulations that their sorrow is translated into something more uplifting than unsettling.
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Feb 17, 2012What is good here is still more than enough to mark Mike Hadreas as an original and important new voice in American independent music.
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Feb 17, 2012Each song here, when attention is paid, is gut wrenching, honest and unabashedly sad while maintaining a sense of resigned acceptance... The arrangements and production, however, tend to drown out Perfume Genius's ability to juggle his subject matter, leaving songs that just don't quite break your heart.
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Feb 17, 2012While it's clear that Learning has a lot to say, it sorely lacks variety of structure, arrangement, and melody, leaving the record with a bit of a stale aftertaste and merely the promise of something greater in Perfume Genius' future.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 25 out of 29
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Mixed: 2 out of 29
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Negative: 2 out of 29
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Jan 9, 2021
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Jan 7, 2015
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Apr 7, 2012