Ryan's Weeknd Review

I was hoping to like this album. Liking it would have been a victory for me.

Allow me to backtrack a bit to explain what I mean there. There was, a decade ago, a pop-punk band from London called The Weekend. I was a fan: saw them live a few times, owned all their albums, even had a bit of a crush on their lead singer. So, when I heard The Weekend were shortlisted for Polaris this year, I was confused and excited, because that band broke up years ago and I hadn't heard anything about a reunion.

The Weeknd is definitely not The Weekend, however. This is, of course, not his fault, and that's why I wanted to like the album. If I disliked it there would always be this question hanging over me of whether I disliked it on its own merits, or if I was just subconsciously bitter about it sounding nothing like a pop-punk band from London. You can see my dilemma here.

So, to prove I'm not just a bitter old man fueled by nostalgia, let me start with some positives: this is a very technically proficient album. There's no denying that Abel Tesfaye, the man behind this album, is a talented singer who's capable of constructing some solid beats.

There's a wide gulf between technical proficiency and creating something great, though, and while The Weeknd might excel at the former, for me he completely failed at the latter. There's this sense of detachment between Weeknd and the lyrics he's singing, and likewise between the lyrics and the music, that stays unresolved and unexplained throughout the course of the album. At no point throughout the album did it seem to me that he cared about the music he was making – and if he can't be passionate about it, how am I as a listener supposed to be passionate about it? That's a question that House of Balloons seems unable to answer.