ALBUMS OF THE YEAR 2011 #1: THE WEEKND HOUSE OF BALLOONS/THURSDAY/ECHOES OF SILENCE

Albums of the Year 2011: #1

 The Weeknd - House of Balloons/Thursday/Echoes of Silence

I'm apparently in good company with this choice. This was a pretty simple decision: nothing else released in 2011 made me want to listen to it more than this trio of albums, and when I wasn't listening to them, I was thinking about them. Like another group whose stock exploded in 2011, Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All, The Weeknd's graphic depiction of sex that inhabits a disturbingly shady space between clearly consensual and aided by drug (ab)use generated a number of compelling think pieces by the likes of Nitsuh Abebe and Sean Fennessey--the Fennessey piece is actually paired with a take on Odd Future member Frank Ocean's Nostalgia, Ultra.--and for good reason: part of what makes The Weeknd so compelling and repellent at the same time is Abel Tesfaye who, like Tyler, the Creator, manages to genuinely turn stomachs while exerting a fierce charisma. Thankfully, The Weeknd avoids the rape and over the top violence of Odd Future (a factor that, unlike some other listeners, I am unable to "bracket" out of my listening experience--this is not some amazing moral high road I'm taking and by no means is it a criticism of Abebe, whose work I love: I am clearly capable of bracketing out my unease at tales of women being plied with drugs in order to be coerced into group sex when I listen to The Weeknd), but the elements of Tesfaye's persona here are incredibly rich. When, on "The Zone," he asks his partner "I'll be making love to her through you / so let me keep my eyes closed. / And I won't see a damn thing / I can't feel a damn thing / but I'm'a touch you right," the acknowledgement of how manipulative and exploitative his behaviour is, coupled with his admission of a kind of absolute anhedonia, transforms otherwise run of the mill seduction diary entries into a strikingly contemporary psychodrama (Abebe, in his piece on The Weeknd and David Lynch, draws a comparison to Tricky, but I'm not sure that the comparison really works on the level of content--Tricky's psychodramas seem of a different sort).

To be clear, I'm not saying these admissions make the persona in the song "good"--and here, I do want to bracket something: the question of autobiography vs. persona,* which is both incredibly complex and probably the question to discuss w/r/t The Weeknd--or that they excuse his behaviour. Rather, I think they add depth to his character in a way that illuminates certain (largely unpleasant) aspects of being a 21 year old male who is heterosexual in contemporary Canada (and the US) and the repercussions of those aspects for both heterosexual 21 year old males and the females with whom they interact.** This is really tangled; basically, the fact that anhedonia, both as a voluntary state and an inevitable byproduct of modern life, has been kind of the key theme for me from "High For This" all the way through "Echoes of Silence" seems incredibly important, not as an excuse for what the persona in this narrative does--ingest a lot of drugs and have sex with a lot of women--but as an explanation for what makes the persona such a seductive figure. What seems to make people invested in this character/able to relate to him is not his hedonism, but the nihilism and anhedonia that overtakes any attempt at hedonism while fueling continued (and inevitably doomed) attempts at hedonism (i.e., the "XO 'til we overdose" slogan adopted by Tesfaye's fans). Or, as the persona would have it in "Wicked Games," "Bring your love, baby, I can bring my shame / Bring the drugs, baby, I could bring my pain." Tesfaye's narratives here seem to be, essentially, ones of jouissance. Now, the important critical question, I think, in discussing these narratives is to follow Jameson (following Lévi-Strauss) and ask what is the real social contradiction that Tesfaye's narratives attempt to resolve (in my view, the Balloons trilogy is an exploration [and attempted resolution] of the psychosexual demands of late consumer capitalism after the rise of Web 2.0). As Abebe points out, this is similar to the area mined by Kanye West (and Drake, a close friend of and collaborator with Tesfaye) in his recent output, perhaps one of the clearest narrative attempts to solve the increasingly apparent gap between capital's demands and human capacity for fulfillment within those demands.

Now, while all of this analysis definitely enriches my experience of the music, this would all be for naught (or, more likely, would be for a lower spot on this list) if the music didn't sound as good as it does. Tesfaye knows how to get the most out of his voice--his impression of Michael Jackson is scary good--and the backing tracks are evidence of extremely good taste and a strong compositional ability. Contrary to the apparent internet consense, I think Thursday is the best album of the trilogy, and the most fully-realized work here. House of Balloons is a brilliant introduction, the sound of talented young man with a vision getting it almost perfect, and Echoes of Silence is a fitting and fairly gripping end with a pretty amazing Michael Jackson cover, but Thursday, from those opening shudders by Abel Tesfaye on "Lonely Star," is the sound of a star at his (hopefully just first) peak.*** Each album in the trilogy reveals new flourishes, from House of Balloons' sample-delic nightscapes to Thursday's flirtations with guitars to Echoes of Silence's brilliant vocal-warping on "Initiation" (James Blake, eat your heart out!). More importantly, though, nothing about the music pulls you out of the sustained immersion in this narrative that Tesfaye clearly wants. In this sense, the comparison to Tricky (along with other people who have haunted this list, like Boards of Canada and Burial) is dead on--this is as fitting a match of form and content as Maxinquaye. In his take on music in 2011 for the AV Club, Steven Hyden claims that there were many good records but no important albums released this year. While there are several records on this list I would be willing to nominate for important album status, I feel strongly about The Weeknd's trilogy of releases. This is vital, beautiful, confusing, damaged, and disturbing music that captures something of life in 2011. I can't ask for more.

*In a nutshell, the poles between which this question operates: Tesfaye is either doing one of the best acting jobs since Bowie or he's an incredibly creepy (but also typical--and shocking in being so typical) young man. I'm inclined to believe it's probably six of one, half a dozen of the other.
**Cf. The incredibly disturbing monologue in "Lonely Star," with its proclamation from an unnamed female (who might actually be Tesfaye's voice pitched up?) that "My body is yours. Give them any other day but Thursday. . . . Every Thursday, I wait for you. I'll be beautiful for you every Thursday. I exist only on Thursday."
***Re-reading Mark Fisher's piece on Michael Jackson not long after listening to "Lonely Star" for the first time, I was struck by how well his description of the first vocals on "Billie Jean" fits Tesfaye's song, too.

ALBUMS OF THE YEAR 2011: #2 BLUE DAISY THE SUNDAY GIFT

Albums of the Year 2011: #2

Blue Daisy - The Sunday Gift

Few albums I heard this year were heavier than The Sunday Gift (maybe only Earth's Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light 1, really). The obvious points of comparison--Massive Attack c.Mezzanine, Tricky c.Maxinquaye and Pre-Millennium Tension--are there, but combined with the softer, rain-soaked greyscale of Burial's Untrue.* The bright colours on the cover feel like something of a red herring; the music on this album is almost relentlessly cast in shadow or harshly illuminated by uncovered 100W bulbs. There's a very real sense of anger on this album that, devoid of someone like Tricky's playing with sexuality and gender, makes for a brutal listen, but one that resonates in the wake of the London riots this summer. If the post-political is the most political, this album soundtracks what that politics entails: fear, doubt, paranoia, and anger, the dystopic world of Children of Men brought one step closer to reality. In this sense, the album pairs well with Black Sun and Pinch & Shackleton, but whereas those albums felt extraterrestrial somehow (or at least temporally distant), The Sunday Gift is shockingly of the present moment. The defiant undercurrent of "it doesn't have to be this way" that is so prevalent in hauntological music from the UK is supplanted here by anger and mourning that it is this way. Menace is the starting point here, with "Distance (Once Upon a Time)" pacing nervously, stalked by its echoing strings, setting up the long march to "The End." Anneka's vocals on "Firewall" are definitely not "Safe From Harm"--she sounds as if she's keening in the wake of a massive armed force's march through a city, the spectre of total policing that is increasingly becoming a reality in the UK and its aftermath.  Heidi Vogel's wailing vocals on "Fallin'" sound so often as if they're saying "no," the denial echoing round and round, lost, empty, and almost defeated. There are no real track breaks here, so everything tumbles together and feeds off what came before. After a few songs, it starts to add up to a bleak picture.

For an album that threatens to slip into broken and defeated territory, though, there remain slivers of hope and uplift. Hey!Zeus's massive turn on "Psyche Inquiry" suggests the anger that fueled the summer's riots finding a voice to struggle and fight on with, a way to demand changes and to hold people to account. The final two songs proper, discounting "The End," cover some of the same ground as Burial's "Raver"--particularly the second half of "Only For You," with its arpeggios and piano/vocals emerging from the hiss and crackle, and the club-ready, almost ecstatic beat of "Spinning Channels"--softly glowing in the darkness and offering a possible way in out of the horror of the rest of the album. Of course, aside from all this context, the music sounds phenomenal. When the beat drops in "Shadow Assassins" it is an upsurge in intensity that is breathtaking at high volumes. "Raindance," with its squalls of noise and arresting chants, might be the closest the album comes to the psychedelic colours of its cover.** And for an album whose world is so resolutely overcast, this is a surprisingly varied listen that is never a chore. Much of the credit for this is due to the vocals: in place of the chopped, looped, and pitch-shifted syllables favoured in so much electronic music right now, The Sunday Gift, like SBTRKT's self-titled album, demonstrates the power of full vocal tracks. Beyond Hey!Zeus's appearance on "Psyche Inquiry," Anneka's two turns on the mic, "Firewall" and "Spinning Channels" are both wonders. The latter is possibly my favourite on the album: the wordless elegies of the album's first half re-cast as a spectral rave diva. Back in 2009, SBTRKT called Blue Daisy as an artist to watch based on the strength of "Raindance." Clearly, this was a man who knew of what he spoke. Few albums released this year feel as timely as The Sunday Gift and almost none do a better job of presenting a massive talent coming into his own. It's a harrowing journey through the darkness of this album back to the light, but well worth your time and energy.


*Another, perhaps surprising, point of reference for me is Radiohead's Amnesiac (cf. this and this), an album whose themes and lyrics (much more so than the techno-dread of Kid A) seem to become more relevant with each passing year.
**Another surprising connection? I can't help but be reminded of The Fifth Element's soundtrack during "Psyche Inquiry" and "Raindance" (criminally underrated movie, by the way).