Posted by Katherine St Asaph on 12/22/2011 at 9:43 AM News

The Popdust Files: echoes of silence, the weeknd

We were beginning to think one of two things was going to happen with Echoes of Silence, R&B creepster The Weeknd’s promised third mixtape after House of Balloons and Thursday. Either it just wasn’t gonna happen, or it’d be a compilation or short EP, kind of like Robyn handled the “oh crap it’s near the end of the year and only 2/3 of my Body Talk series is out!” issue.

At any rate, Echoes of Silence is out, and it has miraculously not crashed Abel’s site, so you can actually download it (at time of writing) without having to plough the pirate seas.

Some Cliffs Notes on this thing:

- As promised, “Initiation” is on here. Part of it is also on “XO.”

- It’s got a cover of Michael Jackson’s “Dirty Diana,” which is right up there with “Smooth Criminal” for Michael songs it would not surprise you in retrospect for this guy to record.

- “Montreal” includes Serge Gainsbourg-written/France Gall-sung (in other words, very French) track “Laisse tomber les filles,” loosely translated to “stop messing with the girls.”

- “The Fall,” reports Stereogum, is produced by Clams Casino, whose work has given him a hell of a year not just in hip-hop but, increasingly, elsewhere.

- Thousands of bros are going to take “Echoes of Silence” completely out of context and treat it as a sweet love ballad, because the piano and crooning mean it could pass for one. (Any track with the lyric “it’s gonna end how you expected, girl, you’re such a masochist” is probably not a sweet love ballad.)

- Probably not thousands of bros, but nevertheless multiple bros are probably freaking the fuck out right now about whether this is better than Balloons or Thursday, good enough to displace whichever one (the first, probably) as their best of the year. Happy holidays, guys–and you’re probably mostly guys!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKEghPZQAEQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebtXqt-9eA8