Melancholic lo-fi magic from a young musician finding his way with touching results.
In the summer of 2010 a young man from Seattle, Mike Hadreas, released a debut album under the Perfume Genius moniker which knocked this writer off his feet. Utterly naked of emotion, with lyrics set to aching swells of distorted lo-fi indie-cum-electronica, it was a striking collection that showcased not a talent with potential, but one that’d been forced to mature before its time. It was one of Huw Stephens’ top five albums of the year. It haunts the iPod to this day with no little regularity.
And now it has a sequel of sorts, courtesy of Youth Lagoon, aka Trevor Powers from Idaho. His July, very much the heart of this eight-track set, set the blogosphere into a state of watery-eyed rapture in early 2011. Pitchfork, very much the platform for This Sort Of Thing to reach a wider audience, wrote that July was "massive, confident and sure-footed in its build from organ-hum to shouting-down-mountains chorus… It does not sound like the work of a single, unseasoned young man". And The Year of Hibernation, work for which commenced around the start of 2010, is full of these moments: motifs that catch one off guard, which halt the progress of fingers on keys and steps on a street alike; lyrics that float like a knee-high mist around bare-bones arrangements of crackling delicacy. It is both a captivating listen and a terrifying one: Powers was 22 this year, but his voice carries all the experience of a man thrice his age.
Lees de rest van deze review op BBC CD recensies (Engels)
Bron: BBC Music