December 2016 - Music
Album of the Month - Starboy by The Weeknd
The speed, efficiency, and care that characterized the rollout for the Weeknd's Starboy were especially welcome coming at the tail end of a year crammed with awkward, mistimed, and otherwise botched album launches from many other leading lights of pop music. Announced in late August with a late-November release date, the album was delivered right on time, and the three intervening months were punctuated by a steady series of sight-and-sound appetizers: new haircut, album art, lead single, music video for lead single, second lead single, SNL performance, bloody bank-heist music video for second lead single, tour announcement, MTV EMA performance, revelation of the full track list, two more lead singles, AMA performance, 12-minute video featuring a medley of songs from the album, Tonight Show performance.
As its title indicates, Starboy is the first Weeknd album in which the artist's global prominence is already a given, and given that its Daft Punk–featuring title single is the first track and lead single, one might expect the entire album to take fame on as its core theme. Such an assumption soon proves itself misguided, at least in part. Fourteen of the album's 18 tracks are devoted not to Tesfaye's celebrity but to his devotion to a woman, and the remaining four tracks (“Starboy,” “Reminder,” “Sidewalks,” and “Ordinary Life”) are scattered at wide intervals. Though there's a shift from the fleet-footed grooves, great to have them back that dominate the first half to the swooping, mid-range ballads prevalent in the second, the transition, over the course of 68 minutes, is gradual enough as to be imperceptible.
He doesn't make music for people in love so much as for people, male or female, who want to be but can't quite make the leap, and his frankness regarding one's attachment to their solitude is anything but kitschy, it's what makes him the most convincing male artist currently active in pop. His ability to speak candidly of the fear and alienation precluding love is what renders his invitations to enter into it that much more convincing and attractive: “You've been scared of love and what it did to you / You don't have to run, I know what you've been through.” Even without the water-brilliant music of the Daft Punk production, those lines on Starboy's closer “I Feel It Coming” would carry weight: With that music, it's pretty much irresistible. My rating 9/10.
The speed, efficiency, and care that characterized the rollout for the Weeknd's Starboy were especially welcome coming at the tail end of a year crammed with awkward, mistimed, and otherwise botched album launches from many other leading lights of pop music. Announced in late August with a late-November release date, the album was delivered right on time, and the three intervening months were punctuated by a steady series of sight-and-sound appetizers: new haircut, album art, lead single, music video for lead single, second lead single, SNL performance, bloody bank-heist music video for second lead single, tour announcement, MTV EMA performance, revelation of the full track list, two more lead singles, AMA performance, 12-minute video featuring a medley of songs from the album, Tonight Show performance.
As its title indicates, Starboy is the first Weeknd album in which the artist's global prominence is already a given, and given that its Daft Punk–featuring title single is the first track and lead single, one might expect the entire album to take fame on as its core theme. Such an assumption soon proves itself misguided, at least in part. Fourteen of the album's 18 tracks are devoted not to Tesfaye's celebrity but to his devotion to a woman, and the remaining four tracks (“Starboy,” “Reminder,” “Sidewalks,” and “Ordinary Life”) are scattered at wide intervals. Though there's a shift from the fleet-footed grooves, great to have them back that dominate the first half to the swooping, mid-range ballads prevalent in the second, the transition, over the course of 68 minutes, is gradual enough as to be imperceptible.
He doesn't make music for people in love so much as for people, male or female, who want to be but can't quite make the leap, and his frankness regarding one's attachment to their solitude is anything but kitschy, it's what makes him the most convincing male artist currently active in pop. His ability to speak candidly of the fear and alienation precluding love is what renders his invitations to enter into it that much more convincing and attractive: “You've been scared of love and what it did to you / You don't have to run, I know what you've been through.” Even without the water-brilliant music of the Daft Punk production, those lines on Starboy's closer “I Feel It Coming” would carry weight: With that music, it's pretty much irresistible. My rating 9/10.
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