I know temptation is the devil in disguise

       

Continuing my trip down The Guardian's top 50 albums of 2022. 

#3 : Dawn FM - The Weeknd


Dawn FM is the Dom Pérignon of male manipulator music – a slick of negging and neediness, sleaze and sanctimony that carries the unnatural, alluring glow of toxic waste. Released without fanfare on the first week of the year and still as luridly spectacular 40-odd weeks later, Abel Tesfaye’s fifth album as the Weeknd is also his most dazzlingly deranged, juxtaposing Rilke citations, Jim Carrey narration and a cameo from indie film-maker Josh Safdie with a hallucinatory vortex of disco, R&B, electro, EDM and hip-hop. Once known for his bloody-minded pursuit of one ultra-specific vibe, here Tesfaye proves he has far more in him than meets the eye; it confirms his status as one of our greatest living stars, an auteur with inspiration and idiosyncrasy to burn.


Our eighth previous visit (and we're STILL not finished) and I found this to be surprisingly enjoyable when I met it back in January.  Revisiting it, I still thought it was OK but not quite as strong as I remembered it being - it's maybe a bit too self-consciously quirky (or "dazzingly deranged", as The Guardian puts it) for me, but it's certainly an interesting listen.  Having listened to After Hours in the intervening period, that one certainly has more obvious high points - "Take My Breath" only really stands out here, but the album as a whole is worth a visit if you've not heard it.


It's fair to say it's done pretty well in the charts since its release - it had a 32 week run but has had another six weeks on and off since and is still hanging around there at #69 as we speak.  Wikipedia tells me that if you really like this, there's an additional TV special - I'm pretty certain I can live without that.  As I can live without this, but I also won't avoid it if I find our paths crossing again at some point.  This wouldn't have been my selection for #3 of the year, but I'm not unhappy to see it there...

#4 - Yeah, I liked this one too
#2 - So many hmmms

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I saw your mum - she forgot that I existed

Image
Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts 22/12/23 :  Stick Season - Noah Kahan Well, this week surprises us on a couple of fronts.  Firstly, and probably the least expected, this is possibly the album I've heard most this year - because obviously I'm a massive Noah fan. Well, it might not surprise you to hear it's not me but my delightful daughter - but you might be surprised to hear just how much my youngest absolutely LOVES Noah, particularly given his folkiness.  She's got tickets to see him next year and (excluding festivals) they're the most expensive gig tickets I've ever bought.  But despite having heard the album loads, I've never actually listened to it, so I'm interested to see what I make of it on a one-on-one basis. You know what - the headline is that, having actually listened to it I can report that, at least in places, I liked this way more than I previously did.  I listened to it over headphones for the first time and t
Read more

She's got a wicked way of acting like St. Anthony

Image
I've done The Guardian's list of the top 50 albums of the year for the last three years and (mostly) enjoyed it, so here we go again with this year's list .  Last year I'd previously met ten of the list - it will be interesting to see whether that is repeated this year.   #50 : Crazymad, For Me - CMAT Coming off halfway between Jenny Lewis and Self Esteem, Dublin’s CMAT sets life’s greatest embarrassments to ritzy country showstoppers – the musical equivalent of piling your beehive high to distract from your tear-reddened eyes. On her second album, she tots up the price she has paid for her bad boyfriends, self-subjugation and knowing avoidance of less-than-romantic realities, always with mordant humour rather than self-pity: “I’m just some stewardess who feeds your pets / And does your dishes and pays your rent,” she sings on the delicate, harmony-heavy Such a Miranda. For all that she has lost in these songs – pride, love, literal cash – her perspective remains a firm
Read more

Croopied in the reames, shepherd gurrel weaves

Image
Continuing my trip down The Guardian's   top 50 albums of 2023 #30 : The Age Of Pleasure - Janelle Monáe Monáe’s last album, 2018’s Dirty Computer, saw the high-concept pop star returning to earth after several albums of space-age fantasia, showing a softer, fallible side for the rest time. Its songs were still divided into three categories – Reckoning, Celebration and Reclamation – indicating an artist who hadn’t quite let go of the structural safety rails. But on The Age of Pleasure, Monáe is resolutely grounded in pursuit of a new kind of body high. To the decadently rendered diasporic sounds of reggae, dancehall and Afrobeats, she hymns pleasure and desire, connecting (as did Jessie Ware also did this year) sex as self-empowerment and celebrating the kaleidoscopic nature of identity. Or, as she puts it on Phenomenal: “I’m lookin’ at a thousand versions of myself / And we’re all fine as fuck.” I have experienced a couple of Janelle albums and I found them somewhat inaccessible -
Read more