The mostly-consistent first half, despite a couple miss-steps, contains most of my favorite tracks on the entire project. The Weeknd, over the course of eighteen tracks, demonstrates a wide variance in song quality. Tracks like “A Lonely Night” the aforementioned “I Feel It Coming” showcase The Weeknd’s ability to remind us of the smooth criminal without sounding like a criminal knock-off. Although Tesfaye isn’t completely able to revitalize Michael Jackson’s talent, he does a passable job when it comes to channelling pop music’s greatest starboy. By sounding more like Michael Jackson than ever, The Weeknd delivers on these deliveries.
The Weeknd clearly provided 21st-century takes on throwback R&B, pop, and dance music approaches. The production reveals evidence of this claim, but of course, in order to fully capture this aesthetic, the production and instrumentation must be accompanied by appropriate vocal deliveries and melodies. To be quite honest, much of Starboy explores this dichotomy. Both songs feature production courtesy of house music legends Daft Punk, who bring their signature catchy, danceable style that straddles the fence between “modern” and “retro”.
A couple highlights in Starboy‘s production can be located in the album’s opener (“Starboy”) and its closer (“I Feel It Coming”). The production consistently reminds the listener of 80’s dance anthems and traditional R&B slow jams with its blissful auras and throbbing rhythms. Much like this celebratory beverage, Starboy‘s production is glossy, high-class, and smooth. Previous projects such as Kiss Land and Beauty Behind the Madness eased this transition from a sound tied to Pabst Blue Ribbon to the sonic equivalent of champagne. It was always obvious that if The Weeknd wanted to unironically refer to himself as a “starboy”, he would need to significantly switch his somber style up. With this brief introduction of Abel’s PBR&B past, let’s crack open his latest case, Starboy. Artists such as Take Care-era Drake and PARTYNEXTDOOR notably borrowed this aesthetic on their sulkiest projects. On this trilogy, Abel Tesfaye (The Weeknd) crooned about his affinities for cocaine and women over nocturnal, moody production, often laced with samples of indie music. The Weeknd’s 3-pack of PBR&B provided a soundtrack for post-partiers coming down from the night’s hedonistic highs (highs both literal and figurative). House of Balloons, Thursday, and Echoes of Silence defined a sound jokingly referred to as “PBR&B”, in reference to Pabst Blue Ribbon, a beer stereotypically associated with hipster culture. In 2011, a starboy in the making released a trilogy of mixtapes that pioneered an entire modern subgenre of R&B music.
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