The Weeknd offers up tightly produced yet refreshing performance

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This article was published 27/11/2015 (3981 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In 2010, a young singer/songwriter from Scarborough, Ont., named Abel Tesfaye anonymously uploaded several songs to YouTube, under the name the Weeknd (which is pronounced, as Wikipedia helpfully points out, like “the weekend”).

Fast forward five years, and the Weeknd is now a bona-fide chart-topping pop star with inescapable, ubiquitous hits in the forms of Can’t Feel My Face, Earned It and The Hills. And based on the ear drum-shattering screams of the young fans at the MTS Centre on Friday night, it’s hard to believe the 25-year-old was ever an obscure Canadian cult figure. He’s selling-out arenas all over North America on his current fall tour in support of his star-making sophomore album, this year’s Beauty Behind The Madness. He uses pyro now.

Clad in black, save for his white sneakers, Tesfaye took the stage to the thundering opening riffs of Real Life at 9:30 p.m., bathed in striking black and white lights. He gave his soulful, Michael Jackson-indebted vocals a workout early, running through the record’s sexiest slow-burners — Losers, Acquainted and the down-and-dirty Often.

By the time High for This rolled around, the sternum-shaking bass threatened to eclipse his vocals — but it’s a testament to his power that he was still able to reach the rafters. No one in the arena was sitting down.

The Madness tour is a tightly produced arena show, to be sure, but there’s something refreshingly unfettered and minimalist about the way the Weeknd does it. There are no costume changes, fussy set pieces or boring, filler stage banter. Just frenetic lights and video that complemented, not distracted, from solid performances. His live band is suspended on a platform, leaving the floor free for Tesfaye and his great, big voice. And he had the entire arena eating out of his hand; not one person was sitting down.

From the simmering Tell Your Friends to the slinky falsetto of Shameless, Tesfaye’s performances stayed faithful to their recorded counterparts. Earned It — his steamy contribution to the Fifty Shades of Grey soundtrack which, real talk, was the only good thing about that garbage fire of a movie — absolutely slayed. He’s the kind of performer that leaves it all on the stage, his face glistening with sweat.

After As You Are and the anthemic Angel — which could have been saved for the encore — Tesfaye picked up the pace with In the Night (which is one of those songs that sounds like a cover but isn’t) before finally tearing into Can’t Feel My Face, which was essentially sang by the crowd. After a performance of Prisoner — minus, sadly, Lana Del Rey’s vocals — the Weeknd closed his 90 minute main set with The Hills, flanked by eight burning torches.

He returned to the stage almost immediately, and opted to close out the night with an old song — Wicked Games from 2011’s House of Balloons — surrounded by a small galaxy of iPhones.

This is the second time this year Winnipeg has been visited by electropop rising star Halsey, who opened for Imagine Dragons in the summer. 

The 21-year-old might have been raised Ashley Frangipane in New Jersey, but you could be easily fooled into thinking she’s another Swedish pop export making interesting but accessible music in the vein of Lykke Li or Tove Lo. Her voice, which is at once rich and raw, has that glacial sheen to it, and she writes songs “about sex and being sad.”

Her set drew almost exclusively from her debut album Badlands, which was released to critical acclaim in August and is, in this writer’s opinion, among the best albums of 2015. Its strongest songs — Gasoline, Hold Me Down, Hurricane — were big and bold live, augmented with live drums and synths.

Halsey calls herself “tri-bi” — biracial, bisexual and bipolar — and has emerged, if reluctantly, as a role model for thousands of “inconvenient women” like her. So, it was unsurprising when a decidedly riot grrrl moment came early in the set. During heartbreaker Colors — with its aching chorus “Everything was blue/His pills, his hands, his jeans” — Halsey ordered the girls to the front, just like Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna did back in the ’90s.

Before Halsey took the stage, Houston rapper Travis Scott — who will also be hitting arenas with Rihanna next year on her Anti tour — got hands in the air with a meat-and-potatoes set of bass-heavy bangers.

 

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @JenZoratti