The Weeknd
Trilogy
Universal Republic; 2012
8.5 out of 10
BEST NEW REISSUE!
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If you checked out completely in 2011,
Trilogy has all the makings of a blockbuster: 22-year old Toronto native Abel Tefsaye along with producers Illangelo and Doc McKinney developed a state-of-the-art R&B template and scored several radio hits; they're associates of megastar
Drake, and have played sold-out club shows and rapturously received festival appearances. But there's one catch: If you
weren't checked out completely during 2011, you've already heard the vast majority of
Trilogy, for free. So it's understandable if you're wondering why this set, which collects
the Weeknd's three 2011 mixtapes in one package and adds three additional songs, exists in the first place. But presentation matters to the Weeknd. This is evident in the project's
early anonymity, the unified typography, the striking
photographs, the ambitious
videos and, most important, the fact that Tesfaye called his three releases of 2011 a trilogy. It's not unprecedented for someone to put out three albums in a year, but Trilogy suggests an ambitious and rigorously planned Work of Art.
While the previously available versions of
House of Balloons,
Thursday, and
Echoes of Silence already felt definitive, a three-hour immersion provides a new way in, assuming you are willing to take it as a single piece. Which isn't easy: in spite of Tesfaye's diaphanous voice and the lush production, these are
heavy records, with tempos that slow to a codeine drip for five minutes or more. But
Trilogy as a whole sets up a narrative that was previously only implied.
House of Balloons is the "fun" part of the story,
though that's a relative term. It has the only Weeknd songs you might play at a celebration, and the only point
where the illicit behavior feels alluring. On
House, the Weeknd introduce an aesthetic that, over the course of the rest of the three tapes, gradually evolves into something deeper and less based in traditional songcraft. It's a continuation of the purple-tinted R&B and hip-hop hybrid forged by
The-Dream and Drake, with eye-of-the-quiet storm assurance of
Sade and
Aaliyah and industrial and trip-hop touches that range from
Nine Inch Nails to
Tricky. But the Weeknd show a flair for melody that allows every richly atmospheric song on
House to stand on its own, boasting strong (and sometimes borrowed) hooks that embrace repetition without feeling manipulative. The cyclical choruses of
"What You Need", "The Morning", and "High For This" in particular are both immediately striking and subtly ingratiating, overtures to pop radio that operate outside of it.
Those borrowed hooks mean that
House of Balloons is the part of
Trilogy most affected by the remaster. If you can't catch how the guitars hit a little harder and the drums have a bit more pop on "High For This", you'll
definitely notice how the sample from Aaliyah's "
Rock the Boat" has been wiped from "What You Need". If I had to choose, I prefer the original
House of Balloons for its spontaneity, but it's kind of like familiarizing yourself with your partner after they get a new haircut; it's just
different for a while, and if you want, you can always go back.
Thursday is exactly the kind of "difficult" second record you'd expect from the Weeknd had they disappeared for two years and holed up in the studio as a reaction to House's success. But it came just a few months after. It's more ambitious in its way, incorporating influences far from the R&B mainstream and generally just sounding like it has something to prove.
The title is a loaded metaphor; Thursday is a day for the most dedicated partiers, the one that separates a lost weekend from a week full of blackouts. Accordingly, the album is an hour-long exploration of people acknowledging a point of no return. What had been seductive has become menacing. Outside of Drake's guest verse on "The Zone", there's not much indication that the songs take place in a club of any sort. The pleasure on House of Balloons felt consensual; here, it feels codependent.
Echoes of Silence benefits considerably from the
Trilogy context and now seems on equal footing with
House of Balloons and
Thursday. As
Juicy J helpfully reminds us out of nowhere at the end of "Same Old Song",
Echoes was released near Christmas, a refractory period between the publication of year-end lists and the turn of the calendar. It's easy to overlook new music that drops at that point, especially in this case, where the lack of immediate hooks suggests that it could have been a rush job.
But get familiar with Echoes' aims and you can hear its value. For one, the lyrical and thematic callbacks make clear that Echoes was meant to interact with what preceded it, to serve as an epilogue and appendix in addition to a denouement. More importantly, it's easier to tune into the final third's resounding depression after having been tenderized by the preceding two hours. It's a morning-after record for a night that never ended, where people have to go into their day shift with no sleep, where club stars still live with parents and the parents find drugs in the laundry. And it's where people who only hours before were perfectly fine to snort their life away simply cannot fucking stand to be around each other for another minute.
But the arresting music redeems that potentially alienating emotional view.
"Montreal" boasts a frigid and concise hurt as well as a pop sensibility that went missing from the previous half hour, "Outside" incorporates intriguing Eastern overtones, and "The Fall" integrates
Clams Casino's brand of beautifully wasted hip-hop, which ascended in parallel to the Weeknd throughout 2011.
On
House's "The Party and the After Party," Tefsaye sings, "They don't want my love/ They just want my potential." In the context of
Trilogy's progression, it's the first crack in his callous exterior, revealing a lifelong studio nerd with possibly years worth of grudges ("I don't play/ Unless it's keys and I play all day," he claims on "Loft Music"). He makes repeated mentions of "potential," and being "next," fixating on those particular words like he's holding onto something a girl told him in 7th grade. If you turn your ear right,
Trilogy is the most in-depth exploration of male sexual neuroses this side of
Pinkerton.
"You never thought I'd go this far," Tesfaye sings on "Same Old Song". That line could be a reference to marathon drug use or the progressive demoralization of his narrator, which bottoms out amidst the pall of gang rape coursing through the very uncomfortable "Initiation". The inclusion of
Michael Jackson's venomous "
Dirty Diana" on
Echoes (renamed "D.D.") is perfect in this context, retaining the original's deplorable depiction of predatory groupies as the feminine norm. Tesfaye's narrator celebrates his own irresistibility and embraces the poisonous justifications of victimhood.
Just as perfect is the closing title track, which finds Tesfaye alone in a quiet room, letting the past reverberate, hitting bottom because he simply stops digging. It's the point where the Weeknd's 2011 stops and it's a perfect way to end things. At least it was; on Trilogy, it's followed by "Till Dawn (Here Comes The Sun)". Like all of the new songs, it's strong enough on its own but arbitrary in terms of sequencing and has only minimal relation to the LP it was included on.
This is some of the best music of the young decade; judging by its already pervasive influence, it's safe to say Trilogy (or at least House of Balloons) will be one of those records that will be viewed as a turning point when we look at the 2010s as a whole. Some of it's up to demographics. Artists of Tesfaye's age had formative years where Timbaland, the Neptunes, Missy Elliott, D'Angelo, and Aaliyah were at the peak of their powers. And given the "new rock revolution" early in the 2000's, which created nothing new at all, it stands to reason that many who came of age in that era don't hear rock as a progressive form. You can sense the shift when talking to new bands. And of course, for those who have some indie rock inclinations, Beach House and Siouxsie samples don't hurt.
Ultimately, the Weeknd's music creates a world. In it, people acknowledge their humanity as expressed by their desires to fuck, to get high, to resent one another, to hurt, to not care about tomorrow. That's a lot for a single artist to take on. "You'll wanna be high for this," Tesfaye memorably sings within the first minute. Trilogy's triumph is in how it makes its three hours feel necessary to fully embrace it all, to acknowledge its existence inside ourselves and to vicariously live through it as art.
