Mini-Record Review: House of Balloons (The Weeknd, 2011)

So much music, so little time to write.  New solution: Mini-record reviews!

The most effectively atmospheric, creepily sensual R&B record of the year comes from The Weeknd, an act shrouded in a cloak of anonymity, but recently revealed to be the stage name of twenty-one year-old Toronto resident Abel Tesfaye. This debut effort evokes the feeling of a night on the town gone terribly, terribly wrong. Tesfaye’s expressive, wide-ranging voice gives me faith once again in the power of R&B. The thing that gives this album such zest, though, is the fact that Tesfaye’s soulful vocal is juxtaposed with terrifying lyrics about drug overdoses, dangerous sexual practices, and, when the night’s cloud clears, cold, relentless pain. It would be easy to accuse this record, as some have, of glorifying a relentlessly hedonistic lifestyle, if not for the fact that all the talk about the pleasures of the night are tempered by emotionally naked expressions of the agony of the morning after. House of Balloons succeeds similarly as Destroyer’s Kaputt in invoking a trippy dream state. The Weeknd’s world, though, seems more like a nightmare.