The fifth album of the Canadian singer, released Friday, January 7, is polite and chrome as a cabriolet.
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In March 2020, After Hours, The Fourth Album of The Weeper, had made the planet dance at the rhythm of his funk-pop “eighties” (Blinding Lights, Heartless …) hymns, at one of the most Manufacturers of the XXI e century. A little less than two years later, the tip of the tunnel is not really in sight. And we ask ourselves if the Canadian Ethiopian Canadian, born Abel Makkonen TesFaye on February 16, 1990, did not give up this time to its lightness, listening to a pseudo-host radio welcome us into the introduction of Dawn FM. This fifth opus came out Friday, January 7, a few days after the surprise announcement of its publication on the streaming sites, the “physical” version of the disc being scheduled for January 28th.
On a tenacious pandemic background, the concept may seem anxiogenic. Because this voice of DJ is that of a kind of smugger of the styx supposed to accompany in the beyond the singer, made up old man on the cover of the album, and his listeners. This narrator being interpreted by Jim Carrey, a comic demon of American cinema, friend and compatriot of TesFaye, we suspect that the crossing will not be too tragic. Especially when the one who embodies The Mask and the Grinch promises “a pain-free transition to this life after death”.
The Weeknd gives him word. Polished and chrome as a cabriolet more than a hearse, Dawn FM offers an all-comfort purgatory. Faithful in this with the Pop Perfectionism of this former marginal experimentation R’n’b, since 2015 (the album Beauty Behind The Madness) one of the biggest providers of tubes from the contemporary scene.
Luxury craftsmanship
We find in this album most of the ingredients that had made the multiplacent success of After Hours. In particular, the jumping melodies of synthesizers borrowed from the Synth-Pop and the New Wave of the 1980s, merged to a more modern electro and a soul-funk marked by the voice and the ecumenical ideal of Michael Jackson.
Not sure to find here a single potential as monstrous as Blinding Lights, or even that Starboy or I Feel It coming, the songs that the Canadian had co-produced in 2016 with Daft Punk. TesFaye’s luxury crafts does not remain a war machine. As evidenced by an album attack where, after some spatial scrolls supposed to evoke the ether, Gasolin is racing at the rhythm of an electronic as percussive as melodic.
Driven force of the POP requirements of The Weekend since 2015, the Swedish producers duo formed by Max Martin and Oscar Holter also guarantees the performance of the single Take My Breath, the only one of these titles published in 2021. Earned with a loop From the electric guitar suggested by other Scandinavian accomplices, the Swedish House Mafia, sacrifice is essential as one of the most dancing titles in the album. When, built on a dry guitar riff, the pimpant Les Than Zero, also owes a lot to all these descendants of Abba.
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