Trilogy

The familiar nature of this material takes nothing away from Trilogy. This is a great commercially available introduction to a young RnB talent who's following Frank Ocean into the mainstream.

This kind of remaster campaign is normally reserved for albums that have had decades to sink into the national consciousness as is, introducing a shock-of-the-new, hearing-it-again-for-the-first-time element, and while the oldest of the Trilogy material has only been around for a year and a half or so, the differences in the new mixes can still be jarring.

Ultimately, Trilogy is more of a sonic landmark then it is a new work.

While a gradual refinement is noticeable from House Of Balloons to Echoes Of Silence, a lack of breathing space between the tracks does them no favours. You're better off dedicating yourself to each album's meaty serving of revelry and regret in turn.

Each trippy disc holds up remarkably well, though we wouldn't recommend listening to all three while operating machinery. [23 Nov 2012, p.70]

Even at its most oppressive (in particular the songs from Thursday), every haunted note of Trilogy seems blissful.

The mixtapes remain practically untouched, giving any new The Weeknd fans a genuine look into what allowed an unknown artist to transform himself into someone who breathed new life into R&B.

The Weeknd starts here. Jan 2013, p.108]

Listen to House Of Balloons, Thursday and Echoes Of Silence in one go and you'll find that the music remains impressive. If there's one quibble, it's that as Trilogy enters its second hour, Tesfaye's lyrical ambivalence begins to sound a bit one-note.

Overall, in fact, it might feel like a little too much of The Weeknd all at once. But then again the music is so good it might just be what the doctor ordered.

The disparate releases are as oil and water as ever, with a new song on each disc that doesn't fit at all, and only the final one, "Til Dawn (Here Comes the Sun)" isn't negligible.

Trilogy's triumph is in how it makes its three hours feel necessary to fully embrace it all, to acknowledge its existence inside ourselves and to vicariously live through it as art.

The Weeknd's emotional range starts at regret and ends at lament, and the new tracks on Trilogy don't do much to change that. Indeed, they sequence so seamlessly into the larger body of his work that they complete it and close it off.

The Trilogy collects three of the Toronto singer's 2011 mixtapes, but some editing might have better introduced him to the world outside Tumblr.

Even at Tesfaye's most awkward, it's impossible not to be intoxicated.

Whatever its limits, however, Trilogy remains a striking piece of work.

The Weeknd weasels his way queasily into unprotected affections under cover of arrangements whose dark, miasmic synth tones and itchy, sludgy rhythms blend the apparently conflicting worlds of R&B and industrial new-wave.