Radon Review: The Weeknd’s “House of Balloons”
I want you to imagine an album that gets name-dropped by Drake at the same time that its title track samples a Siouxsie and the Banshees song. Now I want you to know you can stop imagining and go download The Weeknd’s first album, House of Balloons for free from his official website. House of Balloons is like a nightmarish weekend of endless vice committed to audio, a garage-sounding guilty R&B album of horrors, a Kid A to fuck to.
House of Balloons is hard to understand completely. At its surface level, you can hear the Top 40 crooning, product placements, allusions and not-so-elusive references to sex, and you can write it off as just another R&B album, whether or not that’s your thing. But the deeper you dig into the slow jam dubstep hybrid sound, beats as hollow and lonely as any classic Phil Collins tune, and the way that the vocals have this empty, haunted quality, you can see all these parties, the drugs, and the sexual conquests fail to offer more than a minute’s distraction.
