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The Weeknd – Echoes Of Silence

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One day we’ll all look back on what The Weeknd accomplished in 2011 and our jaws will drop in wonder and amazement. That’s assuming, of course, that we somehow get over the initial shock of how a 21-year-old from Toronto without a record label or any sort of prior claim to fame dropped three mixtapes in a nine-month span that, to put it politely, embarrassed basically everyone else releasing music in the same timeframe. It’s like if all three Lord Of The Rings movies came out in the same year, weren’t butt-numbingly long, and oh yeah, they’re all free, forever. Abel Tesfaye is 2011’s Peter Jackson, an artist who bursts out of obscurity like a bat out of hell with product after product of such undeniable quality that he virtually demands every award in the field.

Echoes Of Silence Cover Art 300x300 The Weeknd   Echoes Of SilenceEchoes Of Silence, for those who don’t know, is the third part of The Weeknd’s mixtape trilogy that began with House Of Balloons and continued with Thursday. Balloons came out on the first day of spring; Thursday came out in mid-August. Echoes dropped the night of December 21, the first day of winter. Therefore, when one considers the amount of sunlight that would accompany the consumption of each release, it makes sense that Echoes (impressively) sets itself out as the darkest of the three tapes.

Now, don’t get it twisted. Echoes does not for a moment sound like anything besides the natural successor to House of Balloons and Thursday. In fact, there’s a good amount of self-referencing lyrics, with “Montreal” quoting “Lonely Star,” “XO/The Host” recycling some “Glass Table Girl” lyrics, and “Initiation” sampling Drake’s verse from “The Zone.” But in a trilogy of tapes about late nights fueled by mind-altering drugs, Echoes sounds like the latest and the most drug-fueled. If that makes sense.

Still, the “nightclub in the first Matrix” vibe on the production serves, as always, to enhance The Weeknd’s melodies rather than overshadow them. The tape begins in a ballsy manner, with a cover of Michael Jackson’s “Dirty Diana” that doesn’t reveal itself as such until the drums enter and nearly blow themselves right out of the speaker. And “Montreal” features The Weeknd singing in French, which I felt really needed to be noted.

I noted in my Thursday review that Thursday followed a pattern set out by House Of Balloons by sequencing its two best songs at slots four and five, respectively. However, Echoes doesn’t hit its peak until tracks six through eight. “Same Old Song” features the best hook on the tape, evoking memories of “The Birds Part 2.” Track seven, “The Fall,” may be the most hypnotic piece in The Weeknd canon, if such designations aren’t blasphemous. And “Next” is the musical equivalent of someone pumping little shots of adrenaline into your blood stream at random intervals until you’re too high to care.

The tape closes with the title track, a somber piano-driven ballad that seems more than understated when compared with the previous 26 tracks we’ve heard from Mr. Abel Tesfaye. Would I have preferred something more grandiose to close out the best set of music (the entire Balloons trilogy, not just Echoes) released this year? I’ve come to recognize The Weeknd as the Steve Jobs of R&B, because he knows what we want more than we do ourselves. The only beef I have with Echoes is that, after only a few listens compared with the dozens of listens I’ve given to HOB and Thursday, respectively, it doesn’t overpower me with its beauty to the point of making me cry to quite the same extent. Obviously, however, this may change with more listens, as it did with Thursday after I reviewed it. The beauty of this trilogy (other than the music, duh) is that each tape does indeed get better and better with each listen.

Now that the trilogy is complete, I can’t help but wonder what the future holds for The Weeknd. The large part of me hopes and expects him to continue producing quality work for years to come. However, if he vanished from music in a Lauryn Hill-esque fashion, no one could say that he didn’t leave his mark. When taken as one work (which it really is), The Weeknd’s trilogy is a 145-minute masterpiece that will undoubtedly stand the test of time, of which Echoes Of Silence is a haunting finale devoid of virtually nothing except disappointment.

bars4half The Weeknd   Echoes Of Silence
4.5 / 5 bars

The Weeknd – D.D.
The Weeknd – D.D.


The Weeknd – Outside
The Weeknd – Outside


The Weeknd – Echoes of Silence
The Weeknd – Echoes of Silence


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