Aside from featuring earlier this year on Drake’s Take Care the most critically acclaimed debut artist of 2011 may well have passed you by. Twenty-one year old Abel Tesfaye from Ontario, Canada, aka The Weeknd burst onto the musical horizon by making three albums inside a year and allowing them all to be downloaded entirely for free.
He delivers similar content to many current R&B artists but it is the humanity with which he tells his nocturnal stories and the honesty with which he lays himself bare which marks Tesfaye out from his peers.
The albums follow a loose storyline and Echoes of Silence picks up where Thursday left off with Tesfaye lamenting the dangers and entrapments of fame. This represents a slight departure from earlier paeans to love and drugs. The haunting melodies and synths still remain but gone are the halcyon party days familiar to debut album House of Balloons and, instead, Echoes of Silence centres around increasingly emotionally harmful relationships and, as such, is easily the most introspective of the trilogy.
The album opens with a cover of Michael Jackson’s ‘Dirty Diana’. The audacity of this is bound to raise a few eyebrows but the strength of Tesfaye’s consistently outstanding vocals and the sentiment of the song, consistent with that of the rest of the album, mean that it is a fantastic opener. ‘Same Old Song’, ‘Echoes of Silence’ and album centrepiece ‘XO/The Host’ all explore similar themes, with Tesfaye presenting tales of girls who pursue him for his fame whilst simultaneously revealing his fear of losing this new-found prestige.
Although its lack of variety renders it the weakest of the three, Echoes of Silence is still a strong album in its own right. However, when the three works are considered as a whole it is no understatement to say that The Weeknd has achieved something remarkable.
4 stars
