With their talk of meteoric rises and bullish predictions of continued success The Fall and Same Old Song seem not to be about a character, but Tesfaye himself. But more disturbing still are the songs that surround them, because they seem to cloud Tesfaye's intention.
XO/The Host and Initiation sound like an artist boldly exploding one of modern pop's great myths and suggesting that what goes on in the VIP area is infinitely seedier and more unpleasant than the multitude of songs hymning its pleasures suggest. After it ends, it haunts you in the same way as a newspaper's graphic description of a crime or a disaster. The latter isn't the first Weeknd song about using drink and drugs to coerce an unwilling woman into group sex, but it's perhaps the most horrible – rhythm clattering, the sweetness of the melody corrupted by the Auto-Tune effect that causes Tesfaye's voice to continually speed up and slow down.
THE WEEKND ECHOES OF SILENCE CRACK
At its centre are XO/The Host – a sneering, chilly dismissal of a groupie whose life has run out of control, with a great chorus, set to echoing electronics and drums that crack like gunshots – and Initiation. The dragging beats, washes of synthesiser and eclectic musical references – chillwave and crunk hip-hop, Aaliyah and France Gall – somehow contrive to sound not just eerie and desolate but cosseting as well, inexorably drawing the listener into a deeply troubling world.Įchoes of Silence is his third album in nine months, and it might be the most troubling of the lot.
A frail vocalist in a genre packed with artists who can sing up a storm, Tesfaye and his producers are nevertheless spectacularly good at capturing a small-hours atmosphere that's both queasy and compelling.
While Drake agonises over the shallowness of wealth and fame, Tesfaye's songs inhabit an actively amoral universe where some kind of drugged-out degradation is often taking place, usually in a hotel suite with its curtains drawn against the dawn.
THE WEEKND ECHOES OF SILENCE FOR FREE
He is a very 2012 kind of pop star, who releases his material for free on the web, declines interviews and instead communicates with his audience entirely via a gnomic Twitter feed and a Tumblr headlined Til We Overdose, on which he posts new music, photos of himself looking impressively off his knackers – boggling at the wreckage of a hotel room, fag in mouth head in hands on the floor next to a bottle of cognac – and, occasionally, worrying handwritten notes: "mama I understand why you're mad – it hurts to accept what I am and how I live and what I did."Īll of this is of a piece with his songs, which push Drake's self-examining take on the R&B loverman persona into more disturbing territory. T here is a theory that the internet has conclusively done for rock and pop music's sense of myth and mystery, but clearly no one told Abel Tesfaye, better known as the Weeknd.
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