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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.
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