You’ve got the sugar-fume textures and the lush reverb, the voluptuously glitzy synths and the unreal perfection of Tesfaye’s deftly autotuned vocals – his angelic voice hiding a glaring intent (Tesfaye often describes his face as something blank – unrecognisable within the shadows, which is starkly telling of Tesfaye’s self-image). Even at its most oppressive (in particular the songs from Thursday), every haunted note of Trilogy seems blissful. The sentiment is made more sinister by the sheer seductiveness of the production, devised by fellow Canadians Martin ‘Doc’ McKinney, Illangelo and the formerly uncredited Zodiac, only acknowledged when Vice revealed that he’d co-produced several of House of Balloon‘s key tracks. Call it D’angelo’s shadowed Voodoo remade by a cherubic egomaniac with a drug problem. But this way they get an anti-hero a Travis Bickle to Ne-Yo’s Gary Cooper. Applicable to a pretty chunk of the genre’s output, contemporary r’n’b’s simplistic characterisation can seem tedious to passing trade, while the constant discourse on sex, or sexual prowess, is sorely missing a context. Never before has r’n’b’s devil’s barter between pleasure and shame been so deliriously disarranged, unquantifiable, intoxicating or plain horrific, which is why The Weeknd has attracted so many listeners from outside the r’n’b hardcore. Drake and Kanye are amateurs in comparison. Tesfaye really is that conflicted, and that corrupted. Despite the fantastical sheen of some Roman à clef caricaturing, and a strong sense that he’s playing for the fourth wall, there’s an alarming lack of self-awareness here – evinced partly by an alarming measure of self-pity. The really disturbing thing is, there’s nothing intentional, or ‘meta’, about it. Trilogy comprises three albums – House Of Balloons, Thursday and Echoes Of Silence, released in that order over the course of 2011 and reissued here by Universal Republic. “Got a brand new girl, call her Rudolph / she’ll probably OD before I show her to momma” he mutters on ‘The Party & The After-Party’. They are merely the ‘hosts’, warm bodies fated to be carriers of Tesfaye’s addictions to money, sex, and drugs. Trilogy is a ghost story, only it’s the protagonists who are the ghosts and the just-out-of frame spooks the flesh and blood, the perennially muted voice of the woman. And with its demise goes nearly 30 years of unchallenged male gaze. By Trilogy’s end, the model seems a psychologically clumsy anachronism, a little like how the cowboy archetype seemed by the ‘60s. And still, the air of empty dissatisfaction is all-consuming.Īn r’n’b album with few equals in terms of narrational ambition, Trilogy doesn’t just expose or subvert the womanising male archetype of modern r’n’b, it destroys it, by rendering it quaintly one-dimensional. In a world of unlimited pleasure, that which nourishes you destroys you. It’s an obvious one, but Tesfaye has a good counterpart in Brett Easton Ellis’ Patrick Bateman, and the preening sociopath’s insistence that “I simply am…not…there’. Spirited through faded, spectral textures, they are translucent with vanity and self-loathing invisible as they pass the mirrors that palisade those penthouse citadels. In the world presented to us by The Weeknd’s epic Faustian psychodrama, ‘The Weakened’ are men whose souls are diminishing with every consummation of their vampirish urges. Always performing his seductions with one eye on the hidden camera, that being us, at the gates of a netherworld Tesfaye’s message is to get out while you still can. ‘High For This’ is a point of no return for the listener too. Before, he threatens to turn the scenario into ‘a nightmare / Elm Street”. What initially seems a tip to enhance the ecstasy he’s about to administer, Tesfaye’s suggestion that “You wanna be high for this” is really a warning – that she anaesthetize herself to a mutilation.
The clue is in the very first line, “You don’t know what’s in store”. As to what comes next… although the Canadian prodigy is a master of double meaning and ambiguity, this time the signs are pretty obvious. Who is the Weeknd? Or rather, who are ‘The Weakened’ of that pointed spelling quirk? On Trilogy’s stage-setting opener, ‘High For This’, we find Abel Tesfaye in his two-floor loft, coaxing another of his victims into consumption. It’s a running theme throughout, like a ritual, as if the narcotising XO is the transfigured blood of this angel-faced killer.