Category: Music

The Weeknd – Echoes of Silence

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

Hopping on the bandwagon here, but I have a few thoughts on the last Weeknd EP of 2011, Echoes of Silence.

One of the real highlights of my 2011 was listening to the first Weeknd EP, House of Balloons. There’s an amazing feeling, one that music lovers chase all the time, of hearing something new, hearing a different take on material that you know well, a different path through well-traveled territory. And that’s something that I heard on that EP. A chillingness, a remoteness, sexy fucking music. Processed as fuck yet as intimate as someone singing softly in your ear. Soft and ethereal, hard and sleazy. 

And it’s a great format. Splitting up the material allows the strongest tracks to shine on their own and take up their own space. Releasing an EP every couple of months allows crazy amounts of anticipation to build up while still feeling like it’s a part of a cohesive whole. The Weeknd became one of the few artists in 2011 that I kept tabs on to check for new albums, and the only albums that I made sure that I obtained the day they were released. I try deliberately to not look at biographical information about the musicians that I listen to, yet I found myself Googling compulsively.

Just like Robyn’s Body Talk EPs last year, the last entry in this three EP series is the strongest, and the most vital. As I said, House of Balloons blew my fucking ears off. It wasn’t only because of the chilled, murky production or the mechanically smooth vocals, it was the interesting way that The Weeknd integrates musical elements that exist outside that closed sound world into the songs. My favorite tracks from House of Balloons are “The Party & the After Party” with that great hook (“You always come to the party/To pluck the feathers off all the birds…”) and “House of Balloons” which integrates a Siouxie and the Banshees sample, a great nod to a predecessor*.

*By the way, the sprechstimme on the line “And no closed doors” is probably my favorite line in The Weeknd’s oeuvre. It manages to be sexy and deeply, deeply sad–and real.

The reason that Thursday remains the EP that I’ve listened to the least is that it retreated back into that sound world. I appreciate the new take that they bring to slow fucking music, but even on the first album, I thought that once there were no external elements to bounce that sound off of, it became formulaic and monotonous. That said, it’s possible that given a little more time, I’ll completely reverse that opinion (see Theif, Hail to the).

Echoes of Silence kicks that door down. Every track is solid. Every track has that mixture of interior, exterior; hard and soft. I’m still working through the Gotterdammerung-epic quality of an album as big as this, but I love the interplay between different sounds on this album, and the ambition. “D.D.” takes a song by the biggest pop star ever and manages to blow it up even bigger. And I love the winking quality of the title; it acknowledges that it’s a cover while staking out a new identity.

Great EP.

Lady Gaga & Tony Bennett

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

Singing The Lady is a Tramp:


I was surprised and impressed by Gaga’s chops. I’m sure it’s massaged and produced like anything else, but I finally have a clear sense of what her voice sounds like.
I wish I could say the same about her face. She’s amazing to me because images of her are everywhere and yet I wouldn’t recognize her if she was walking down the street in front of me.

After Hours

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One of the listening projects I’ve been pursuing casually on the side is an effort to become a little more familiar with rap. It’s definitely the (US-based) genre that I’m least knowledgable about, and one of the reasons that I don’t plan on blogging on it that much is that my ignorance is so deep about the music that I don’t even know what I don’t know.

I didn’t grow up with it around me. I had cousins that listened to rap and hip-hop, but I was a kid right during the scary days of get-you-shot gangsta rap. I’m pretty sure that my mother saw it as a symptom of All That Was Evil In The World–I never watched The Simpsons growing up either.

Anyway, one of the pleasures of going back and trying to listen (selectively, I know) to the history of rap in roughly chronological order is that there is such a settled body of masterpieces. Although I never recommend that people listen to music this way, I could listen for months without straying from “greatest albums” lists*.

*I think that there’s something missing from listening to music if there’s no risk that what you’re listening to is just terrible. 

Another pleasure is going back and comparing what your favorite tracks from an old album are with the tracks that have emerged over time as the highlights. For example, I’ve been obsessed over the past week with A Tribe Called Quest’s debut album, People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths Of Rhythm. 

“After Hours” is the third track on the album, and it’s catchy as fuck. It’s built on this insane Sly Stone sample that cuts a groove so strong that sometimes it cuts out and there’s nothing but percussion and still your brain hears the sample because it’s just that strong and just that catchy. It’s the track that I would have picked out as the “single,” but it was never released that way, and it’s one of the tracks on the album that doesn’t have its own Wikipedia page.

Now, it’s probably true that with an album as beloved as this one, every track is regarded as a masterpiece and tallying prestige based on Wikipedia attention is foolish. Still, it’s good to be reminded sometimes that we all have very different ears, and those tracks that you skip might be someone else’s favorite.

The Enduring Van Cliburn

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The New York Times has some nice coverage of pianist Van Cliburn’s enduring popularity in Russia:

Legend says that Mr. Gilels was worried enough to approach Khrushchev about the American. “Is he the best?” Khrushchev is said to have asked, and when Mr. Gilels allowed that he was, Khrushchev said, “In this case, give him first prize.”

The mania for “Vanya” or “Vanushka,” as he came to be called, cut through all levels of Soviet society. A Russian violinist, Artur Shtilman, recalled the tremulous words of a janitor who said the performance had left her strangely transfixed: “This young man, really just a boy — he plays, and I sit and cry. I myself don’t know what is happening to me, because I have never listened to this music, and I simply cannot tear myself away.”

Despite the fact that Mr. Cliburn had no plans to play the piano on this visit [to Russia to serve on the jury of the International Tchaikovsky Competition], Yevgeniya Zalyashina traveled 120 miles from Tula to be present at all his appearances — which sometimes consisted of just walking into the concert hall. She was joined by a group of women who had met in 1958 while standing in line all night for tickets.

“You have to understand, people were talking about him on the bus, on the Metro,” said Lyudmila Avdushina, 73. “For us he was never a foreigner, he was one of ours.”

This prompted me to seek out YouTube footage of the performance of Rachmaninov’s 3rd Piano Concerto that won Cliburn the prize.

It’s an amazing performance. I was unprepared for how young Van Cliburn was; he’s almost cherubic. And those rubatos! I don’t think a performance like this would fly on the competition circut today.

The Muppets Trailer

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I don’t have a sentimental attachment to Muppet movies the way that many of my peers do. I’ve actually never seen the classics, only Muppet Treasure Island and A Muppet Christmas Carol. It’s easy to be cynical about the way that the Muppet properties have been put through the Disney marketing machine, like Winnie-the-Pooh (both sets of characters and stories were conceived independently, then bought by the DIsney Corporation). If any project has a chance, though, it’s something like this, where a dedicated person with a great affection for the material (in this case, Jason Segal) works hard to bring new life to it. After all, the Muppets are only a hop, skip and jump away from the Dracula musical in Forgetting Sarah Marshall: