the party & the afterparty

Review: The Weeknd - Echoes of Silence

Why not review an album hours after its release? Things move fast now, hype is warp-speed, so best enjoy it while its fresh. And aren't The Weeknd the most befitting subject for this kind of reaction? Abel Tesfaye's project feeds off the buzz, hate, love, etc. generated by the same dispersed online audience that he has offered up his immaculately produced, beautifully executed mixtapes to all year, and all void of a discourse save for Tesfaye's undeniably shitty Twitter account - Weeknd albums come to us as clean as the sound itself, shorn of any critical and promotional baggage - but one that is soon after filled in by amalgamation of all those little moments of reaction that his collective audience of critics and listeners (and it seems like a good chunk of these listeners are critics) have felt and expressed.

And if general opinion is anything to go by, it's that general opinion is The Weeknd is amazing - various year-end lists with House of Balloons somewhere near the top have commented that Tesfaye's was the sound that united highly diverse and otherwise antagonistic listening groups in 2011. I feel like this kind of claim needs empirical evidence - insane blog and Twitter hype doesn't count, given as a fairly specific group of listeners are the ones producing this chatter. But I'll give in to intuition and say, yes, basically anyone who loves music will find something to like or even love in The Weeknd. And for free! And lots of it. Three mixtape albums in a year - and sure, whilst admittedly there's been signs of diminishing returns throughout this 'balloon trilogy', in isolation, anyone of these three would be more than enough to recognise that here is a prodigous, precocious talent.

What anyone will also find in these three albums, if they care to listen, is I think a subtly executed but also oddly engrossing narrative, a tragic story of excess and its shadows. In this regard, if House of Balloons was the courtship - Tesfaye oiling us up with his debased but undeniably exciting ways - and Thursday was the party itself, then Echoes of Silence is the comedown, the morning after where you put some Sade on the stereo and nursing your heavy head, think about all the fucked up things you did and how your girl fucked you over last night and wonder about how soon you're going to do it all again. Each album in the trilogy has, somewhat amazingly, achieved its own specific aesthetic - from the alternating ecstasy-soaked epics and late-night slow-jams of his debut, to Thursday's faux-rock histrionics, and now Echoes of Silence, with its far more sombre tone, each song a kind of holding-pattern ("the same old song", as he sings on the track of the same name, that maybe "you don't wanna sing no more" as he admits on 'XO / The Host') of not necessarily great emotions - jealously, regret and loneliness chief among them.

The album opens with a cover of Michael Jackson's 'Dirty Diana' - an explicit acknowledgement not only of the influence MJ's vocal style seems to have had on Tesfaye (there's a couple of seconds where the two are indistinguishable) but also of Jackson's tortured, existential romanticism that he perfected in songs like this and 'Smooth Criminal'. Later, on 'Outside' he's letting a girl use the same positions she liked with her ex as he tries convincing himself that it'll be okay once he's inside her and that he's the one she wants. Bitterness, jealously, the lovelorn run-off of one-night-stands - the dull glow of heartache pervades the atmospheres of Echoes of Silence, even if Tesfaye tries convincing himself otherwise, that he "ain't scared of the fall". The other side of the coin, the feeling of waking up. The balloon has been popped.

What has unified The Weeknd's trilogy, apart from Illangelo and Doc McKinney's uniformly amazing avant-R&B production, is Tesfaye's ultra-seedy spin on the typical sex and drug signifiers of the genre, taking them into their most debauched and perverted extremes until something like a crypto-Surrealism is reached. I'm not talking the melting clocks and quirky styrups saccharine of a Dali, nah uh - what we're dealing with here is pop's version of Bataille's renegade surrealism - the kind of works which in the words of Adrian Martin "enact a bleak politics of surrealist transgression - a tearing open of bodies, and a voyage of no return into furiously alienated minds". I don't think I'm drawing a long bow here when I say that listening to The Weeknd is basically the sonic equivalent of Hans Bellmer's La Poupée series - a never-ending parade of fucked up bodies contorted through the sickening haze of the coke-gaze.

That's why 'Initiation' is both an apt and an odd track on this fairly introspective album - well, let's say, even more instropective than usual. At the pivotal point of the album, it's basically the epitome and let's also say the exhaustion point of the fucked-up-party-surrealism that Tesfaye has been developing. As the music trips from left-to-right channel, creating a sense of woozy, giddying disorientation, the narrator creepily, softly croons to a girl that she "can have it all" (his attention, affection, that is) only if she passes his "test": "to meet my boys" - now there's conjecture around the traps as to what the 'boys' Tesfaye is referring to here actually are. Is he - echoing the slightly creepy mention of "light-skinned girls, first flight from Poland" on his guest verse for Drake's 'Crew Love' - basically talking about a gang-bang? Or is he saying that, as the rest of the lyrics would suggest, that if she wants to get down, she has to be introduced to and imbibe all the various drugs that will cause the kind of vocal effects we hear throughout the song, constantly warping and winding their way up and down in pitch and speed:

Got you drinking out them white cups. Sodas. All this shit sound foreign to you. Thick smoke. Choking. Babygetfamilliarwiththeorderjustcrackitthenpouritthensipslowthentiplowmyeyesredbut mybrimlow that x o

But really, I don't think whether it's his boys or his 'boys' that Tesfaye is really referring to is the point here, it's the fact that he's fucked up enough to make this highly ambiguous comparison in the first place. The gang-bang-as-bunch-of-drugs-as-gang-bang extended analogy perfectly dilates The Weeknd's wider sketch of a hedonism that understands no moral or material bounds, where every night is a party and every orifice is a receptacle for drugs and/or genitalia, take your pick.

But there has to be consequences right? Smack bang in the middle of the album, 'Initiation' is the debauchery that surrounds the dawning sense of consequence and alienation that might be the ultimate byproduct of the kind of lifestyle House of Balloons and Thursday introduced us to. Girlfriends go missing, things go quiet, parties always end. Echoes of Silence really is a fitting conclusion to all this unbridled hedonism, and poses the question that everyone puts off thinking about whilst the good times are rolling - what's going to happen once it all comes to an end? What do I do then? And who will I have left?

I like the thrill

Nothing's gonna make me feel this real

So baby don't go home

I don't wanna spend tonight alone

Baby please, would you end your night with me?

Don't you leave me all behind

-- 'Echoes of Silence'

dope as dark

In lieu of a 2011 review, I just want to say a little bit about how amazing hip-hop and R&B have been this year. Mixtape with some of tracks mentioned throughout is below.

These genres have always been musically promiscuous, hustling beats, samples and hooks from anywhere their producers can find them, but 2011 marks a year in which the boundaries truly exploded, where much of this music found itself drawing from the fringes and ending up in some bizarre and thrilling limbo between commercial boom-bap and truly outré esoterica, both and neither at the same time. This isn't the willed abstraction of a Shabazz Palaces or Antipop Consortium, hip-hop for thinking men, but neither is it outright chart-chasing rinse. Instead, this is music dripped in a thick haze of experimentation and sonic adventurousness that always keeps one eye on a listenable, rappable beat and structure. The result is something both immediately accessible - laced with gripping hooks and beats - and continually beguiling, ever deeper. At the core of this music is the way in which raps just melt into the lush, hazy productions in a way that's about ambience and atmosphere as much as the traditional concerns of beat and rhyme.

There are a number of directions this thing has gone, and here I'm thinking about the more languid stuff that some have labelled 'cloud rap' - basically hip-hop's night bus or chillwave - which shares the same trashy, lo-fi aesthetic of Dipset trance but dials down the mood and pace, dripping plastic. That's why, unfortunately, I don't really have room in this piece for Araabmuzik - a dude whose MPC detournements of commercial trance music I've written about previously - despite the fact that he perhaps epitomises the paradox of epic roughness that I'm trying to get at here, where constant reminders that 'You are now listening to Araabmuzik' would leave you thinking you were listening to a hastily cut demo CD if every song on Electronic Dream didn't also sound like stars exploding. Nevermind, though, because the final word on Araabmuzik comes from the man himself: all you need to read are the choice quotes collected on his last.fm bio, nam sayin'.

Anyway, the woozy aura of the hip-hop and R&B I'm thinking about centres around two poles. First, there's the 'based' sounds of Clams Casino, who typifies the duality of this stuff in that he produced beats for Soulja Boy whilst also releasing an EP on witch-house/drag label Tri Angle this year. He also did hazed-out work with dollar-sign rapper A$AP Rocky for the ground-shattering opening tracks of his LiveLoveA$AP and later track 'Leaf', which also features associates Main Attrakionz (released also on their 808s & Dark Grapes as 'Take 1'), the prime members of the prolific Green Ova Underground crew, whose swamped out, psychedelic indie-rap is another major touchstone here. Clams' Instrumental Mixtape collects various base(d) tracks he has made for Lil B, Soulja Boy, etc. and given their own room to breathe, the spectral aesthetic of his work emerges fully-formed as a singular, atmospheric take on electronic production.

Then you've got the Canadian contingent, the OVOXO - Drake, The Weeknd and all the implausibly and consistently amazing Toronto knob twiddlers in their crew: McKinney, Illangelo, Zodiac, Boy-1Da and Noah '40' Shebib. Whilst the styles are distinct here, much of this stuff revolves around a less swampy, more immaculate down-tempo, ambient vibe marked by sexy synth and keys. This late-night slow-jam style is switched up with the occassional epic like 'Headlines' or 'Lonely Star'.

Both these poles emphasise different elements of the new vibe - call it the cannabis-cocaine continuum - but there's two things that, at the risk of sounding glib, they both have in common: drugs and computers. Whether it's the psychotropic cloud of Clams and co. or the uppers, downers and coke-addled cornucopia of The Weeknd, this music seems to almost literally attempt to transubstantiate the experience of getting high, tripping, etc. into musical form. Rap has always done this, sure, but there's more of a willingness now to musically and lyrically explore the darker parts of these vices, the weird places they take you to and the bizarre sounds they can produce. The Weeknd epitomises this - whether it's all a ploy or not is up for debate, but a track like 'Initiation', with its chopped-and-screwed vocals, is basically designed to sound out the experience of taking a pharmacy aisle's worth of drugs which, not coincidentally, Abel Tesfaye is singing about - the warped up and down pace of the vocal pretty much perfectly approximates the shift from the dissociative drowse of lean to the hyped-up gloss of coke. Elsewhere, in a beautiful turn of phrase, Colin McGowan says the music of the Green Ova crew "sounds like an anthropomorphic freezer bag full of narcotics eating itself—one moment commingling with the clouds, the next neck-deep in a swamp thick as glue".

Then there's the internet. As I said, rap has always feasted on the fruits of sounds it has cherry-picked far and wide, but there has never been as much exposure to 'outside' as much as there is today, in a way that has made hip-hop and R&B the premiere exponent of the 'miscegenation' that Sasha Frere-Jone's so longed for a few years back when he surveyed the white-washed world of indie rock. Only the funny thing now is that 'black' music is borrowing liberally from genres and subcultures traditionally seen as white - from Danny Brown's hipster-thin jeans to Main Attrakionz sample of ethereal pop outfit Glasser on 'Bossalinis and Fooliyones Pt. 2'. There's a parallel story here about white producers and black rappers - peep Clams Casino and his clientele - but the fact these artists are coming together signals just the kind of utopian 'smelting pot' someone like Emerson held out hope for and, what's more, for once it's white people in the background.

One thing driving this explosion of sounds and influences is the networked digital, in two ways - the first is that these producers are have grown up punching out beats on a laptop in their bedrooms and flinging them out through the ether via self-maintained Tumblrs or even just Mediafire links - the concept of physical releases and actual studios is largely alien to them. All that's needed is a cheap computer and some $250 Fruity Loops software, and with that an openness to different production and distribution styles, and these producers have found ways of not just approaching but eclipsing the 'digital maximalism' of recent electronica that Simon Reynolds has recently passed ambivalent comment on:

The combination of computer (infinite flexibility) and internet (infinite resources of raw material and "inspiration") seems far more likely to cause complete artistic paralysis: the impulse of fusion collapsing into con-fusion, the musical equivalent of a gone-too-far collage.

Reynold's fears about all these options prove unfounded in the hands of someone like Lex Luger, who has crafted a distinct and streamlined but indeed maximalist aesthetic from the very tools that Reynolds daunts, as Alex Pappademas writes about in his excellent article on the young producer:

A few years ago, before anyone knew his name, before rap artists from all over the country started hitting him up for music, the rap producer Lex Luger, born Lexus Lewis, now age 20, sat down in his dad’s kitchen in Suffolk, Va., opened a sound-mixing program called Fruity Loops on his laptop and created a new track. It had a thunderous canned-orchestra melody, like an endless loop of some bombastic moment from Wagner or Danny Elfman; a sternum-rattling bass line; and skittering electronic percussion that brought to mind artillery fire. When the track was finished, he e-mailed it to a rapper named Waka Flocka Flame.

The beat Pappademas is talking about here, the one Luger flipped off one afternoon in his dad's kitchen, is 'Hard In Da Paint', the beat du jour of the exploding trap rap phenom, which is somewhat tangential to the vibe of the hazy hip-hop that came to fruition this year, but ultimately linked to it in a deeper sense by the DIY ethos of the young, autonomous producers pumping out hits with consumer-grade audio software on along all points of the rap spectrum. The other thing we find out in the Pappademas article, also alluded to in the Reynolds quote above, is that Luger "has what seems like a million sounds loaded into this laptop" - and that's the other side of the coin of the agency digital production has leant these producers and artists: the excess of digital consumption. These young producers are ones who have grown up in the MP3 era, when any conceivable music is just a couple of clicks away - I know this is a terrible cliché, but it's also true. Scope the influences and samples used by producers like Luger and the Main Attrakionz kids and you get a sense of how huge, and liberating, these musical options have been. With the increase in inputs, hip-hop and R&B's outputs have only become more interesting. What we're seeing this year are the strange fruits of the digital apex of the hustling, do-it-yourself ethos that has always attended hip-hop, which taken to its limit and exploded beyond the genre's own bounds has opened up a whole new, darker cosmos. Just peep how Clams Casino finds his samples - not through obscurantist crate digging but digital serendipity:

To find things to sample, I used to just type a random word-- like 'blue' or 'cold'-- into LimeWire or BearShare and download the first 10 results. I had no idea who the artists were or anything.

If there's a third factor in this music, it's perhaps the most unlikely of them all - emotion. Hip-hop and R&B in 2011 is a post-808s & Heartbreak paradigm, drenched in affect. Half the time its the anger, regret and despair stirred up by drugs and the status of the scene itself that we're dealing with - from ASAP Rocky being 'sick' of hipsters and 'tired' of backpack rappers to The Weeknd's incessant, resigned reflections on coming-down - there's just as much here about genuine shit, and perhaps no one more than Drake embodies all these conflicting tendencies, as post-fame anxieties are mixed in with reflections on love, loss and nostalgia. A brilliant Fader article on producer Noah '40' Shebib and Drake's fascinatingly intimate relationship sheds light on the conditions necessary for this - not only Shebib working "to force-feed R&B to rap music" to "make rap more musical" (a key push that has a wider resonance in the trends I'm describing) but also the 'comfort zone' he has created for Drake in their late-night sessions, which allows the rapper to bring his guard down, as Drake recalls in the article when he recorded 'The Calm' for 2009's So Far Gone mixtape:

I would be [at Shebib's] every night and I hated going home. I was deep in debt with my family. We were fighting every night. I had spent a lot of money at trying to succeed at music with these poppy songs like ‘Replacement Girl.’ Trying to be famous and trying to do it with a hit. I remember I had this vicious fight with my uncle on 40’s balcony. I had never said such cruel things to anybody; I had never had such cruel things said to me, especially by a family member. 40 could tell I just needed to say something about it. He made me this beat. I wrote the first verse in his bedroom, which is where we used to work. He gave me an opportunity to vent about my serious family situations. That was a definitive moment in my career. That was the first time I had ever said anything like that.

Drake has continued the same sort of raw, confessional tenor with this year's Take Care, an album whose title is lifted from one of Gil-Scott Heron's final songs, 'I'll Take Care of You', which itself was remixed by Jamie xx. The remix version also provides the bed for the standout title track of Drake's album, a collaboration with Rihanna about forgiveness and the bonds of love. The convoluted, colourful background to this track and its downbeat, ghostly take on Chicago house might epitomise all the things about openness, exploding influences and strange, stirred sounds that I've loved in hip-hop and R&B this year, but ultimately it also holds the promise that this music might also be "an open letter, about family and struggle and it taking forever".

Dope as Dark 2011: A Mixtape
[right-click pic for download; tracklist below]


01 - (00.00) - Take 1 - Main Attrakionz feat. A$AP Rocky (prod. by Clams Casino)
02 - (04.47) - Wassup - A$AP Rocky (prod. by Clams Casino)
03 - (07.25) - Genesis - The Jealous Guys (prod. by Jeremy 'Zodiac' Rose)
04 - (10.25) - What You Doin' [Lil B] - Clams Casino
05 - (14.32) - We Can't Stop - jj feat. Ne-Yo
06 - (19.42) - Make It Happen - Araabmuzik
07 - (21.48) - Chuch - Main Attrakionz (prod. by Friendzone)
08 - (25.12) - Marvin's Room / Buried Alive (Interlude) - Drake feat. Kendrick Lamar (prod. by 40, Supa Dups)
09 - (33.27) - Initiation - The Weeknd (prod. by Doc McKinney & Illangelo)
10 - (37.47) - Thinking About You - Frank Ocean
11 - (41.04) - Take Care - Drake feat. Rihanna (prod. Jamie xx & 40)

eros/thanatos

HTRK - Work (work, work)

The problem with pleasure nowadays is that it’s just really hard work. When the injunction to ‘enjoy!’ is no longer optional but a veritable demand in all aspects of our daily lives, desire and its consummation are no longer something special and rare but just a grind. Grind, grind, grind. A relentless grind from which we cannot escape. Labour isn’t just something we do between 9 and 5, it’s constant, pervasive – at the gym, the club, in bed we’re always “Working that body out”, as Jonnine Standish intones through the distant haze of ‘Work That Body’.

“Girls move to the back / Boys move to the front”, she drawls elsewhere, on standout ‘Eat Yr Heart’, over some genuinely industrial beats, the sound of persons and machinery locked in some doomed sex/death march. “Your body’s so perfect”, “You fill me up” are heard later, Standish’s choruses are like bizarre snatches from the clichéd, ironically passionless language of porno talk, cosmetics commercials and R&B tracks. Work (work, work) is both a mirror of contemporary sex and its inversion, mercilessly replicating its hydraulic, oppressive character whilst also peeling back the true horrors that are its runoff: contorted, mechanised bodies ripped apart and reassembled with petrochemicals and pharmaceuticals so that they may continue their macabre dance of interlocked limbs.

Manufactured pheromenones, plastic breasts, “glucose, cellulose, saccharine” (‘Eat Yr Heart’) – not to mention Viagra, amyl nitrate, Ketamine – sex truly is synthetic and we’re all doing bondage, whether we realise it or not. Looking for an emotional statement or genre-defining moment on this record can only miss the point – that the languorous pacing, stubbornly-looped programmed beats and abrasive textures are all there to teach us but one thing: at the end of all this grinding, we’re emptied out, as bleak as this album’s undeniably desolate atmosphere.

say you'll remember

Lana Del Rey's overly-affected 50s Hollywood starlet with a dangerous smile kind of steez is just great. The reason her schtick works so well is because she has cunningly read the nostalgia that lies at the heart of all the recent powerful female soul vocalists for a kind of feminine origin, a Patti Smith or a Nancy Sinarta to take us back to some musical home we never had. Del Rey's approach is to take all such vocal and lyrical allusions - there's Smith and Sinatra, but also Cat Power, Tori Amos, you name it - and blender them into a kind of vocal melange that kind of leaves you insatiable - beckoning for a kind of fulfilment, a faint hint of 'that voice' or 'that chorus' that you have heard before deep in some past and know as a classic, but that isn't quite the same and that keeps you from bringing it up. In this way, along with her heavily generic lyrical references (her recent singles are unironically called 'Blue Jeans' and 'Video Games') and collage-heavy, faded video aesthetic - with homemade skate tapes and lovers footage interspersed with equally as temporally hazy snippets of old cartoons and films, Super 8 and moving pans of old but iconic US landmarks - Del Rey disassembles and reassembles our nostalgia for us in the very same movement. Our memories are all media now, not like they ever weren't, but it's in this longing for a home inside them that she exploits and caresses so smoothly that makes her work so immediately powerful.

bitcrushin'

What is it that makes Araabmuzik's Electronic Dream so immediately and uniquely brilliant? Coz in many ways its absolutely generic! With its nondescript divas singing about love-in-the-club, liberal use of easy-hitting trance euphoria, and some might say overuse of rapid-fire kick-drums. But in a sense, its convention is its invention - it sounds like a Cubase demo; it sounds like racing game music; but it really doesn't. Cop its absolutely cliched title too - there's nothing new here, but that's of little importance when all these familiar elements are used as sonic assault weapons.

Its unrelenting, this album, and the compressed length of the tracks only works to intensify this sweetly oppressive feeling that some of the best club tracks achieve. Part of the genius here is the alchemy Araabmuzik has discovered in mixing the melodic overtones of trance with the repetition and rawness of crunk beats - hip hop and dance never looked so good together. The other intensely brilliant technique is the shortness of the tracks - nothing is left around too long to gather a residue of monotony or boredom, everything hits hard and sharp and then bails, with the next same-but-different beat right behind it, abruptly beginning.

In this way, Electronic Dream feels not just like a club mix but almost like an album sampler - the constant replay of some chick half-singing "you're now listening to Araabmuzik" just like you get on a rap blend downloaded off the net or an advance album copy only increases this feeling. Maybe Araabmuzik has the 70 minute boring-as-fuck version of this album on his laptop somewhere. Probably not. He realises electronic music is like a hand grenade - the splintering harshness of his beats, shards blasting out my speakers, last only as long as an explosion - which is both miniscule and infinite.

Craig Mathieson on Authenticity

A little while ago I had a great conversation with Australian music critic Craig Mathieson to talk about the craft. Whilst it was for another project, he still had some great stuff to say and was as funny and insightful as his writing tends to be. Amongst other things he had a classic and concise take on the debates around authenticity, genres and who's footing the bill. Transcript of this section below.

What do you think of the popism and rockism debate in the US?

Well Americans came to pop music really late, and they always used to look at the British, because the British would write about anything, in their very British way, and the Americans were very unsure of pop music for a long time. It's almost an alternative badge now, in America, to be into pop - the more pop the better, you know, right down to this bizarre fetishising of Kylie or someone as being this completely authentic pop figure. Umm, well I used to fight about this when I was a kid, but I remember when people used to get upset because bands used keyboards on records. [Laughs] That's ludicrous to you probably, and it's ludicrous to me now, but you know we used to take that shit really seriously. So I don't get too bothered about it now. You know, music is more mashed up every year anyhow. But it's funny how indie attitudes and stupidity sort of hangs on, like "what's independent?" and "who should be in the AIR Awards?"

I find that stuff kind of exhausting.

It's just a sideshow. It's what's on the record in the end. I really don't care who drove the truck to the store. Unless it's paid with conflict diamonds or some shit, and I'm pretty sure Liberation's not doing that these days.

Well I remember the liner notes to Godspeed You! Black Emperor's Yanqui U.X.O had a diagram connecting major labels to arms manufacturers.

Well EMI used to make parts for nuclear weapons, a division, they made triggers or something in the 80s. But I mean I don't think a record company could afford to be in arms manufacturing anymore.

I love how disproportionate the cultural influence of the recording industry is, given how little money it makes. One oil company would make tonnes more than the entirety of the record industry.

Yeah it's like, no one worried about BP for a really long time, and you know, look what they were capable of doing once they fucked up. You know and everyone's worried about why Husker Du are on Warner Bros or something.