Album Review: The Weeknd- Kiss Land

Hey remember like two-ish years ago, when The Weeknd was just a super mysterious project out of Canada that Pitchfork loved and had some kind of vague association with Drake?

Yeah, those were different times.

The Weeknd is the product of Montreal based singer Abel Tefsaye. Damn near anonymously releasing shadowy, seductive, borderline rapey, abstract R&B tracks online, he truly made headlines with the release of House of Balloons, the first of three free “mix tapes” made available online.

With each subsequent release of 2011, Thursday, and then finally Echoes of Silence, Tefsaye’s profile continued to grow—culminating with live performances and the 4^th quarter 2012 major label reissue of the Trilogy, as they were deemed—and with each step further into the spotlight, whether intentional or not, Tefsaye became less mysterious.

So this album is called Kiss Land, which is straight up an embarrassing title for your album. Kiss Land? Like are you kidding me? What does that even mean? And Tefsaye’s need for secrecy and mystery are obviously a thing of the past—his goddamn face is on the front cover.

Tefsaye is 23 years old—meaning that he was still shitting himself in diapers during a portion of the era his music desperately tries to emulate: the early to mid 1990’s R&B sound.  Walking a horribly fine line between homage and being completely derivative, Kiss Land expands on the sound Tefsay already had nailed down right out of the gate—this time out, just throwing major label money at it, making things as gigantic and cinematic as possible.

Part of the original draw of The Weeknd, especially early on with singles like “What You Need,” was how restrained and minimal things could be—a trick that created an underlying sense of dread and palpable tension in the songs. That’s long gone now, as each song on Kiss Land just continues to grow in size—by the time the album gets to the halfway point, with the uncleared Portishead sample on “Belong to The World,” and the Drake guest verse on “Live For,” it’s obvious that Tefsaye is writing things now to be enormous in scale, a trait that, again, strips away the layers of mystery he had originally tried so hard to build around this project.

On the title track, Tefsaye utters something about being “camera shy,” which is a little hard to believe at this point. There’s nothing shy about Tefsaye or the content of Kiss Land. It’s a self referential, self-aware journey through various avenues of debauchery—drugs, alcohol, three ways, strippers, and money are just a few of the topics that get mentioned in, like, pretty much every song. Tefsaye knows he’s successful, he knows that bitches are down to fuck, he knows that he’s amazing in the sack, he knows he’s got a drug problem and he’s not going to do a fucking thing about it.

But how much of this is fact or how much of this is R&B fiction?

Similarly to the tales of murdering people and crack smoking that run rampant throughout hip hop albums, as an artist active for really only the last two years, how much of this has actually happened to Abel Tefsaye? Even on House of Balloons, the opening track, “High For This,” he recalls a tale of coaxing a young woman into sex while on ecstasy (probably.) I mean, what an audacious thing to open your debut album with.

I’m not quite sure who the intended audience for The Weeknd is—is it the Pitchfork set? Is it people who are both drawn to and repulsed by the flagrant sexual overtones of every word he utters? Is it for those who just love throwbacks to the 1990’s R&B sound, which has made a resurgence in popular music?

Kiss Land is not a groundbreaking effort. But in retrospect, neither were the records released as the Trilogy.  The real groundbreaking aspect of Tefsaye is his ability to market himself—certainly the mystery that surrounded him early on was more drawing to listeners than the music itself. The whole act gets a little old throughout the course of the album—it’s like, yes, okay, I get it: bitches love to fuck you, you are an incredibly successful R&B performer, and you love to drugs. And yes wow you have an endless array of synthesizers and big budget percussion that rattles my headphones when I listen to this album.

Kiss Land can be looked at two ways—either as The Weeknd’s 4^th album or 2^nd album. Either way, the Lothario turn has worn out its welcome, but I’m relatively confident that Tefsaye isn’t capable of anything else—whether it’s a character or if this is autobiographical, he’s a chemically dependent womanizer, and in his mind, there is an endless supply of lyrics on that topic.

Kiss Land is available on Tuesday, September 9th, via Universal Records.