Eli Santiago — Special to Southern News
Drug laced melodies, and lust driven drums put you in the zone for The Weeknd’s newest installment, “Thursday,” in his three part mixtape series.
Toronto based singer, The Weeknd, follows “House of Balloons” with “Thursday,” an exploration into sexual desires, heartbreak, and intoxication. This time listeners are hypnotized into an out of body like trance making them succumb to the Weeknd’s voice.
Sonically, the beats and Weeknd’s voice are as if you’ve been mixing drugs and alcohol all night. It’s very atmospheric almost putting you in his shoes and feeling the women crying for one night to be his Thursday.
On the opening track “Lonely Star,” a potential lover proposes “If, all I could say is if/Promise you won’t regret me like the tattoos on my skin/Let the wrong doing come to me/One day I’m hoping that you, will remember me/When you f*** them you’ll see my face/My body is yours/Give them any other day but Thursday.”
This dance of desire can be seen at different points in the mixtape like on tracks “Life of the Party,” the title track “Thursday,” and “The Birds.” The story of this relationship between Thursday and The Weeknd is almost of Shakespearian caliber filled with sex, drugs, love, and deception.
Where his last project, “House of Balloons,” felt like the after party, “Thursday” brings you to the lust filled nights in the VIP room.
“The Zone” brings you behind the red velvet ropes where morals are left at the coat check table. With lines like “I’ma touch you right, ooh yeah (let me sip this slow)/I’ma touch you right (let me get inside my zone)/I’ma touch you right (just let me)” and a surprise verse by Drake where he adds “Well, girl lets go/Walk your broken heart through that door/Sit yo’ sexy ass on that couch/Wipe that lipstick off of your mouth/I take it slow,” it’s hard not to feel the plush couches, taste the alcohol, smell the perfume of the women dancing around.
The Weeknd delivers a musical landscape going from heavy deep synth driven drums to melodically haunting acoustics that only help to flesh out his signature singing style. From high pitched serenading vocals to defeated crooning, we hear him go from taking control of his desires to falling victim to them.
For example, in the acoustically driven “Rolling Stone,” Weeknd sings “Yea I know I got my issues/Why you think I f******’ flow?/And I’ma keep on smoking ’til I can’t hit another note.”
It’s moments like these that add to the depth to his music, which is mostly sexually driven. It adds insight into the person that is The Weeknd, whether he’d be weakened by the lifestyle that he describes or if the weekend is what he lives for.
This second installment fits perfectly with its predecessor only adding another “must have” under his repertoire, and it’s only a matter of months before his third installment “Echoes of Silence,” hits the blogs sites to fix our cravings of The Weeknd and his music. Overall: 4/5 Owls.
