Music, Style & Culture

The Weeknd - Echoes Of Silence

Another affirmation of what made the first mixtape so outstanding, but little progression.

Twelve months back, if someone had said that the last meaningful release of 2011 was set to be the Weeknd’s third mixtape, music listeners around the world would have collectively spat out their coffee. Prior to the start of the year, Abel Tesfaye had only three, youtube-uploaded tracks to his name. Any subsequent success would have to take time, surely. And yet the Canadian singer has enjoyed such a rush in word-of-mouth hype, we’ve barely had any time to witness a backlash. ‘House of Balloons’ caught the imagination with its Beach House and Siouxsie and the Banshees sampling, its dark, comedown interior and its sheer originality - nobody else came close to making music of such a style.

Follow-up ‘Thursday’ promptly followed in the mixtape stakes, but its general reception echoed a call of being underwhelmed. The second release fell a little short of the mark; coming across as a cynical reproduction of the emotions scattered on top of its predecessor - an underdeveloped, as well as overproduced work. Despite the slight let-down, 2011 remained defined by this bolt out of the blue, this new face who for a good proportion of the year, was a mysterious, anonymous phenomenon.

Another act to take up the baton of producing well-received, ground-breaking mixtapes was Clams Casino. The New Jersey producer, having released one of 2011’s finest releases in the form of his ‘Instrumentals’ mixtape, assumes production duties on Tesfaye’s third work, ‘Echoes of Silence’. His presence is immediate and obvious: The extreme, punchy percussion of opener ‘D.D’ helps save face on what is otherwise a queasy rendition of Michael Jackson’s ‘Dirty Diana’. Such expert production continues to define an otherwise scatterbrained work, in which The Weeknd dives somewhat aimlessly between his signatory 4am comedown blues and his midnight sex-fevered state, all of which we’re a little too used to by now.

On ‘Echoes of Silence’, we’re given yet another affirmation of what made the first mixtape so outstanding, but there’s little progression from there onwards. ‘XO/ The Host’ shows Tesfaye at his most intoxicated and desperate, throwing lines like “I need something from you, there’s so much love to pass around,” in the hope that his femme fatale will turn her head. On ‘Same Old Song’, he’s showing a similar state of anguish, a state that continues throughout the tail-end of the mixtape, by which time you grow a little uneasy and tired of his typically joyless situation.

Tesfaye’s voice works best not when it’s accompanied by layer upon layer of big, brash instrumentation, but when it’s arranged next to an echo-chamber piano or a more minimalist synth line. You get the sense that all thick synthetics and bolshy percussion is a means of overshadowing or distracting from the candid expressions of emotion Tesfaye so often applies. But when he cuts an isolated figure, as he does in the mixtape’s closing, title-track, you begin to get interested in how he feels and how his disastrous night has gone. Because elsewhere you dither off and the Déjà vu alarm bells begin to ring. Though we’ve taken kindly to his initial candid outbursts, playing the same card three times straight is something of a negative move, when you consider how willing we were to hear more of this guy post-’House of Balloons’.