THE WEEKND at Massey Hall, Thursday, October 17. Rating: NNNN
You might want to consider wearing ear plugs to see The Weeknd.
On the first of three tour-ending Toronto stops, a young Massey Hall crowd went shriek-wild for the alternative R&B singer whose birth name is Abel Tesfaye. And for good reason. On Thursday, Tesfaye, Toronto born and raised, displayed star-making stage presence and charisma that we haven’t seen on previous local outings (Mod Club, Sound Academy).
Maybe it’s the comfort that comes with completing a tour. In front of a three-piece band and flashing screens whose images simulated a Tokyo streetscape, Tesfaye performed tracks from his brand-new album Kiss Land – Belong To The World, Pretty, The Town, the title track. For the latter, the Japanimation imagery was replaced with an explicit girl-on-girl sex video, at once annoyingly distracting and distractingly erotic.
No matter how well he owned Kiss Land, though, the new couldn’t compete with tunes from 2011’s Trilogy – obviously and especially those from his House of Balloons mixtape. “Even though this is a Kiss Land fall tour,” he said, “we gonna be playing the mothafuckin’ classics tonight!” And with that, he swooped into HoB’s Glass Table Girls.
Tesfaye’s music is all about fluidity, and fittingly, his transitions were some of the show’s highlights: the moment a slo-mo version of What You Want flipped dramatically into Professional when High For This morphed into The Party & The After Party when the Drake-featured Live For bled into Crew Love, the Drake song that helped make Tesfaye famous.
Throughout them all, he channelled Michael Jackson in both his spin moves and his honeyed, falsetto pipes that never faltered. By the time the encore actually happend, my ear drums could have broken. So even though I could kinda hear him singing Wicked Games, it was more like watching an artist who’s definitely found his footing, and undoubtedly come into his own.
“Can I get sexy for you Toronto? Can I get on top of you Toronto? Can I make you come three times Toronto?” he asked.
As evidenced by this show, The Weeknd is talented, willing and eager to please.
