(RCA)Over the past half decade,R&B has increasingly staggered off the dancefloor in a daze, landing on expensive soft furnishings to stare into an empty glass. The man mostly – but not exclusively – responsible for this development is Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye, or whose heavy-lidded influence on the mainstream shows limited sign of abating. As the success of Justin Bieber’s recent Purpose album testifies,the trend for horizontality in pop has transformed even that former teen irritant into a slinkier figure. Next up is Zayn Malik, whose departure a year ago triggered One Direction’s split.
Although Malik reports that much of Mind of Mine was recorded in a mobile studio in the woods, and virtually everything on his debut solo seems to win place at 3am in some unimaginably squishy VIP area beyond the VIP area. There’s the convincing,close-whispered seduction of Be Four, which might have cracked the internet when Malik – generally understood to be 1D’s most musical asset – held a sultry tall note (and dropped a reference to 1D’s Four album).
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Source: theguardian.com