Song Review-What You Need (The Weeknd Cover) by Kwamie Liv

by Dan-O

The 7 song Lost in The Girl EP is more proof that this is the year of the R&B mixtape release. Kwamie Liv pushes her alluring voice in all kinds of cool directions. Lots of the songs have beats that shift and change as if to confound expectations but when the largeness of the sound is held back far enough for you to really hear her voice…its breathtaking; like a gust of cold wind choked out in perfectly desperate and deliberate diction.

A great cover song raises everyone’s stock. This song made me want as much Kwamie Liv as I could get my hands on (that was not creepy, stop it). Beyond that, the precision she puts into it really highlights the brilliance of Abel Tesfaye’s (Weeknd’s real name) songwriting. What You Need is the scariest flipping song in modern R&B history (for those of us who are not sexually predatory) which makes it the ideal centerpiece for his monstrous debut mixtape House of Balloons. No matter what you think about current Weeknd content no one can take away the importance of this song and what it did for the genre.

If you get through this and love it like I did do two things. 1. Reload House of Balloons in your phone/mp3 player/lawnmower and think about all the artists who borrowed Abel’s style. 2. Download Lost in The Girl EP (http://www.djbooth.net/index/albums/review/kwamie-liv-lost-in-the-girl#!bG5i5r) and enjoy all the different tempos of whistful Kwamie Liv you can get. You won’t be let down.