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" In 2011, when Abel Tesfaye, the singer who operates under the name the Weeknd, released three free albums of murky, gloomy, and highly addictive R&amp;amp;amp;B online, he was hailed alongside Frank Ocean (who released his Nostalgia, Ultra mixtape at nearly the same time) as a new breed of artist who might possibly save the genre from the moribund state it had achieved after several consecutive decades of concerted polishing. Whether R&amp;amp;amp;B needed saving was a matter of debate (especially when fans of Terius &amp;quot;The-Dream&amp;quot; Nash&amp;#039;s boundary-pushing career were involved), but the impact of those records was immediate and undeniable. Within months young artists like Miguel were placing odes to psychedelic drugs on the pop charts, and even reliably middle-of-the-road performers like Brandy were experimenting with darker, edgier textures. Whether Tesfaye would be able to convert that influence into pop stardom for himself remained unclear. Last year Universal re-released the three digital albums in one package called Trilogy. It sold modestly compared to the buzz surrounding him, but no one could be sure if that was the fault of the music itself or the fact that it had been available for free online for a year already or that the prospect of buying three albums worth of music at once might be daunting to the average pop consumer. With the release of his first official, label-backed album last week \u2014 which is set to be number-two on the Billboard album charts \u2014 it&amp;#039;s apparent that Tesfaye is ready, willing, and able to take his career to the next level, and possibly the one beyond that. Kiss Land isn&amp;#039;t the ecstasy-drenched slap in the face that House of Balloons was when it first materialized from out of nowhere. The record is clearer and less standoffish than the Trilogy material and it puts its pop ambitions up front: The hooks here tend to be broad and direct instead of sneaky, and for the most part Tesfaye&amp;#039;s voice is presented loud and clear, rather than lurking back in the mix like it did before.      Anyone expecting Tesfaye and his team to use his new label backing to push even further out of the established bounds of pop R&amp;amp;amp;B than before \u2014 the In Utero to Trilogy&amp;#039;s Nevermind \u2014 will be disappointed. The limp one-two of &amp;quot;Professional&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;This Town&amp;quot; that opens the album is disappointingly generic, like a pair of cuts pulled from a random recent R&amp;amp;amp;B record and dipped in a little extra reverb. And even as the songs improve over the album&amp;#039;s running time, there&amp;#039;s a feeling of careerist calculation where there used to be a brazen disregard for conventional wisdom.  As you dig deeper into Kiss Land, it becomes obvious that it&amp;#039;s not In Utero that Tesfaye&amp;#039;s trying to remake, but Michael Jackson&amp;#039;s Bad. That album&amp;#039;s aggressive, rock-inflected take on R&amp;amp;amp;B has been an obvious influence on the Weeknd sound (his album Echoes of Silence opens with a cover of &amp;quot;Dirty Diana&amp;quot;), and the volatile blend of sensuality and rage and psychic turmoil that Jackson projected on it (probably the most emotionally real music he ever made) is basically what Tesfaye&amp;#039;s been shooting for from the start.  Kiss Land is littered with nods to Bad, from Tesfaye&amp;#039;s MJ-ish vocal tics to the arena-rock drum fills that pop up on about half its songs. And the closer it gets in its own skewed emulation, the better the album becomes. Probably the best two songs come halfway through. &amp;quot;Wanderlust&amp;quot; is a throbbing but bouyant uptempo funk-rock hybrid in which Tesfaye plays a man who&amp;#039;s both in thrall to aggressively sexual women and exceedingly sensitive to the emotional fallout that comes with hooking up with them, an almost identical character to the one Jackson played in &amp;quot;Dirty Diana.&amp;quot; On &amp;quot;Kiss Land,&amp;quot; he flips roles, positioning himself as a cold-blooded lothario who&amp;#039;s into transgressive sex and emotional detachment, over an instrumental track that would probably sound like a classic Jackson ballad if it weren&amp;#039;t for the layers of distorted synthesizers and the loop of a woman&amp;#039;s screams. It&amp;#039;s a strange and magnetic moment, as unsettling as it is fascinating. Songs like that aren&amp;#039;t what&amp;#039;ll push Kiss Land to the top of the charts (where it&amp;#039;s already heading), but they&amp;#039;ll make him worth keeping up with. -- Miles Raymer is a music writer based in New York City who has contributed to the Chicago Reader, Vice, Pitchfork, and others. Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/music/a24762/the-weeknd-kiss-land-review/>