So this is music to seduce with. This is pulsating and palm-moistening. This is atmospheric R&B that revels in the nocturnal. An assured depiction of those infernal, uncontrollable city nights that wells with a smoothly calculated sensuality, leaking into the room as you listen. The vocals are suave and sexy, writhing playfully and the instrumentation is laced with a reverb that gives the synths, samples and drums a languishingly dark tone - the songs moan into life, swaying like the tide at twilight, and you can almost feel yourself swaying too.
This gloomy, drug-fuelled, hedonistic undertone certainly suited what, at the time of release, many people had called a mysterious band. The Weeknd, with their painfully absent ‘e’, are now known as singer Abel Tesfaye and producers Doc McKinney and Illangelo. It’s true that, perhaps, to begin with, mystery added to the appeal of House of Balloons, but we shouldn’t lose interest just because they’ve been unmasked. This music stands up for itself. The songs are hook-laden and vocal-heavy, but there’s no saccharine poppy infectiousness to be found. It’s the tone - the ambience - of these tracks that captures you and makes House of Balloons more than your average album (let alone any free mixtape). The overblown Tesfaye vocals soar, rising and falling, elongating and quivering over the simpler backing vocals, the production never leaves the instrumentation anything other than smooth and seductive, and, in terms of tempo, the songs rarely breach the borders of relaxed. The unashamedly x-rated lyrical content may be off-putting for some, but it is an integral part of The Weeknd’s package - along with the Beach House sampling, and the introduction of that now oh-so-familiar bass wobble.
The atmosphere created, pregnant with ideas and possibilities - with its disregard of consequences, with its self-loathing self-indulgence - is almost impressive enough to distract you from the main weakness of the album - the lyrics. But not quite. The lyrical content, unfortunately, is often clumsy: “In that two floor loft in the middle of the city / after rolling through the city”, or falls into cliché: “get you dancing with the devil” and this can be very frustrating. Especially when some songs, such as ‘The Morning’, paint such vivid pictures of the nocturnal lifestyle: “Got the walls kickin’ like they six months pregnant / Drinkin’ Alize with our cereal for breakfast” and songs like ‘House of Balloons/ Glass Table Girls’ are, instrumentally, so perfectly poised - switching seamlessly between two contrasting halves and making perfect use of Siouxsie and the Banshees’ ‘Happy House‘. Especially when songs like ‘Wicked Games’ bring a new dimension of martyrdom and remorse to classic urban egotistical lyricism.
I don’t believe that The Weeknd necessarily want to openly pinpoint the self-loathing inherent in the lifestyle they are depicting, however when Tesfaye sings: “I left my girl back home / I don’t love her no more” there is definitely an underlying sense of shame. They may not be trying too hard to broaden the scope of their R&B - sex, drugs and money still reign - but as you listen you can sense that self-destruction inherent in every lyric and every beat. It reminds you to be wary, sure, but the night has never sounded so alluring.
