Goff's Pick of the Week- House of Balloons by The Weeknd

Let me start by saying that I hate the singer of The Weeknd. That’s not to say I hate his voice, which is smooth, soft and buttery, which as it turns out are three words that could not be applied to any other aspect of House of Balloons, I hate his personality. While the person being portrayed by the singer is likely a character as opposed to a real person (I doubt anyone could actually survive the amount of drugs that are discussed in the songs , or maybe its just an embellishment?) he is awful in every single way, a sort of Darth Vader of modern music, because of the actions he describes to the language that he uses. From an excess amount of drug use and foul language to the very negative way that he views and treats women, The Weeknd’s singer (and whoever decided to take that e out of the band/persons? title) is someone you love to hate. Having said nothing positive about the album as of yet you probably are thinking gee, why is this the pick of the week? The answer is simple, that everything else about the album, the music underneath the vocals, the album cover, the very unnerving yet ephemeral aesthetic,  and the price (free!) are all absolutely fantastic. The delivery is brilliant, everything ties together perfectly to the point where you forget that you want to kidnap the singer and drop him off at a clinic.

The best way to describe the music is in terms of the album cover, which does a splendid job of capturing the mystique of the record. The cover, as pictured above, is a black and white photo of a naked woman in a bathtub whose face and a majority of the room are obscured by balloons. The picture is immediately haunting, the situation depicted catches the eye off guard and confuses the mind. For one, a celebration with a women in a bathtub with a hundred balloons might be fun, but everything that is fun is sucked out of it, the colorful balloons are drained of their brightness, the women’s face is obscured and her body unpleasant, and the oversized bathroom feels crowded and claustrophobic by the sheer amount of balloons that occupy the scene.  And that’s what the music tries to depict too, a person who took everything about a good time so far out to the extreme that it became ugly and deformed, and on the whole, sad. The underlying music samples some great tunes from Siouxie Sioux and the Banshees and Beach House, both of which are distorted almost beyond recognition into something that feels entirely new and terrifyingly poignant. The Weeknd is a band of aesthetic and house of balloons summarizes every part of that perfectly.

And who are they? Where did they come from? How did they get to be that way? It remains a mystery. The album simply showed up one day for free download on the internet, no description, no revelation. The Weeknd are in essence the modern internet version of The Residents, nothing is known,  and it’s better that way. One of two possibilities abound with the music, that they are a true story, a tortured artist who leaves an anonymous cry for help out on the internet that happens to also be a fantastic album, or that there is an extremely skilled artist who has simply decided to remain anonymous. Instead of knowing which is which and who is who, the listener is left with something far more compelling, an ambiguity that  lets the imagination wonder like an old horror film that keeps the camera off the monster till the very end.

You can download this and the Weeknd's other two mixtapes for free here:
The Weeknd.com