Review Summary: “Won’t You Take Me As I Am?”
Let me just get one thing off my chest before we start this review: the development story of this album makes me sick. An indie darling who once sat at the vanguard of popular music kowtows to his A&R reps to make cannon fodder pop that downplays whatever strengths he had as an artist. It's the kind of thing that spits on fans in favor of creating fair-weather partnerships with ephemeral talentless hacks. I feel deeply for the XO fans who look at this album as a sort of Faustian concession.
Now, with that bit of self-righteous BS out of the way, I can say this:
Beauty Behind the Madness, while expectedly subpar compared to Tesfaye's mixtape efforts, stands as perhaps the best pop “album” of the year, one that desperately attempts to be a latter-day
Thriller and largely succeeds in its endlessly focus-grouped effort to endure on the power of its singles.
"That's quite a lofty statement," you intone to your keyboard and barely asleep cat. Let me explain. In terms of narrative and cohesion, Michael Jackson's
Thriller left a bit to be desired. It's less an "album" than a collection of magnificent singles. Songs like "Wanna Be Startin’ Something," "Thriller," and "Human Nature" are all brilliant, but play to different constituencies. What made the album work, aside from its excellent of-the-moment production and tight pop songwriting, was just how marketable it was. Fan of disco? Buy
Thriller. Fan of R&B and pop? Definitely go with
Thriller.
The Weeknd's sophomore effort espouses this same brand of “everything in a blender” album construction. Just look at the four (!!!) singles to drop from this album. There's "Earned It," a sumptuous slow-burner designed for prom night and the ensuing coital mishaps. There's "Often," a straight-up trap banger with an earworm of a chorus and companion piece "The Hills," a by-the-books Weeknd song if there ever was one. And then there's the world-conquering electro-funk of "Can't Feel My Face," a song tailor-made to be enjoyed by any-and-everyone, whether you want to or not. Each of these songs play to a different demographic or subset of music fans, and they all succeeded in doing so. Call it selling-out if you want, but for The Weeknd it’s been uncommonly effective.
This kind of "please everyone" showmanship runs through all aspects of the album. Opening track "Real Life" takes the triumphant strings of "Earned It" and matches them with a radio-ready hook about his mother's disappointment in his life choices. It's a prime cut of pop music, and one that effectively kickstarts the album. "Losers," which features a perfunctory Labrinth guest spot, takes the brand of Emile Haynie and Paul Epworth-trademarked stomp-clap neo-soul that acts like Emeli Sande and Sam Smith have been putting out and matches it with some faux anti-establishment lyrics about how "only losers go to school." In terms of its radio potential (the only real metric this album holds itself to) it's another winner, but marks the first instance where the new populist clothes Abel's rocking don't exactly fit.
The end of the album’s first quarter brings with it some songs that were probably specially engineered to appease or at least placate fans of
House of Balloons and
Echoes of Silence. The
Kanye West-produced "Tell Your Friends" feels like the logical continuation of
Thursday-era Weeknd, with Ye's old-school soul beat channeling the hazy aesthetic of songs like "The Morning.” The lyrics too ("dope dimes on some coke lines/give me head all night, cum four times”) recall Balloons-era Weeknd in their lurid yet enticing detail. Ultimately, it's the second half of “Friends” that demonstrates how much better at songwriting the Weeknd's secretly become. The autobiographical details he peppers in lend the song the same kind of "oh, it's not fun anymore" vibe that made
Echoes of Silence such a compelling listen. Mix this with the banger-combo pack of "Often" and "The Hills" and the itch you had for the version of The Weeknd that made "Loft Music" and "High for This” should be suitably sated.
Unfortunately, as is customary and almost required for a heavily-marketed, focus-grouped pop album of this scale, the middle half is the rough part. While "Acquainted" and “Shameless” again work the “appeal to the OGs” angle to diminishing returns ("Shameless" is good enough, but fails simply by trying too hard to evoke "Rolling Stone" in its pleading verses and guitar and bass production), the stretch of songs that populate the album's middle section all sag, relying almost shamelessly (pun intended) on " dammit let me be
famous" theatrics. Tellingly enough, this is where the vast majority of the album's singles assumedly lie ("Can't Feel My Face, "Earned It," and much-hyped future single "In The Night" all squat here). The songs themselves work as displays of Abel's newfound love of hooks, but they don't quite match the timbre or intricacy of the songs preceding them. Without any kind of true buffer, they read like
Xscape b-sides, good enough to perk up a school dance but not visceral enough to do right by its headliner.
The final stretch of the album fares a lot better. "As You Are" proves to be one of the most emotional performances offered up on the album, and the suitably downtempo production (courtesy of the better Kiss Land producers with Illangelo's supervision) lends it another layer of existential funk. Lana Del Rey provides a "just good enough to be notable" guest appearance on the extraordinary "Prisoner," and Ed Sheeran tries on his best Drake impression on "Dark Times." Abel appears in rare form on these two songs, actively trying to not be outdone by his features. It’s endearing listening to him try that hard, but considering their performances he wasn’t quite in danger of getting shown up.
In what was likely a conscious decision, the album ends just as it began with "Earned It"-style orchestral instrumentation on "Angel," a song that comes close to being the best case for the whole Stephan Moccio x Abel Tesfaye pairing if only they’d decided against the children's choir.
Something I find to be uniquely telling about this album is how some of the most marketable and potent songs on the album are more sonically and lyrically in-line with some of Abel’s older content. The guttural Southern-style bounce of “The Hills,” the soulful boom-bap of “Tell Your Friends” (which could really shine with a Kanye or Drake verse tacked on) as well as the post-everything torch song “As You Are” all demonstrate the elements of The Weeknd that put him on the map: a knack for populist songwriting, an otherworldly voice rooted in post-Diasporic melisma, and the unique ability to inhabit spacious and cacophonous music without getting lost in it. Unfortunately, many of these traits are downplayed in the album’s “too many cooks” approach to composition and sequencing. This hurts the Weeknd as an enduring “stone on the shore” style star, and it hurts the whole scope of what he’s been doing for nearly half a decade now.
The best example of this legacy-ruining potential lies in the album’s depth. One of the most exciting parts of the Weeknd's oeuvre has been its thematic and narrative consistency. Even
Kiss Land, in all its introversion and self-loathing, hewed close to a particular narrative of being alone and foreign to both your own home and to other places in the world. There's no such narrative here, and the songs lose something potent in its absence. While Abel's tales of hedonistic self-loathing played well when cohered into a warning or a biography, without that they're mildly scintillating at best and disgustingly over-specific at worst.
Gripes aside,
Beauty Behind the Madness stands as an incredible achievement. For Republic Records, it’s proof that unique talents like the Weeknd have a place (albeit a trite and overpopulated one) in the pop zeitgeist, while for Tesfaye himself it’s the realization of a dream of his that he’s held onto since he left his home dirt-broke and alone at 17. And while I could probably go on for hours about how he sold out and how he could’ve actually come through with a bonafide indie classic (again), Abel’s response has already been put on wax. On album standout “As You Are,” to a beat punctuated by a snare clearly sampled from a balloon popping, Abel sings pleadingly “baby won’t you take me as I am?”
With an album like this, it’s hard to say no.
