The Weeknd
House of Balloons

LA RECENSIONE

If "a word is enough to the wise," for Mr. Aubrey Drake Graham, known simply as Drake, a single tweet is all it takes to generate hype and bet on a Canadian talent, more specifically from Toronto, named Abel Tesfaye, aka The Weeknd.
"House of Balloons," along with "Thursday" and "Echoes Of Silence," completes Abel's debut trilogy in 2011, available for free online right from the start, a significant act, a gift at the disposal of anyone, offering a sense of free musical sharing, the genuineness of the twenty-year-old who prioritizes the instinctual need to be heard and express himself over profit, a therapy and a hope.
The Mixtape is a breath of fresh air in the contemporary R&B scene and is almost a whisper in the ocean of low-cost industrial music production, where blind improvisation ordinarily replaces talent, but Abel's whisper makes enough noise to harmonize without being off-key through a vibrant falsetto and an acrobatic vocal tone capable of tackling a challenging, dark, and restless musical landscape.
The prison of lust, where drugs and sex act as "Argo Panoptes," is a recurring narrative in each track, and "High for This" opens the doors for this purpose, where real and imaginative life stories intersect with excessive pain and indulgences; the transition to "What You Need" highlights a darker undertone, the echo of the desolate atmosphere of "Massive" influences underscores the Ethiopian young singer's need not to remain idle, honoring his predecessors (listen to Frank Ocean, Jamie Woon, for example).
In "House of Balloons"/"Glass Table Girls" (a reworking of Siouxie and the Banshees' Happy House), Dub sections and a tuner break into a summer Jam atmosphere, sharply softening the transition from pop R&B to New R&B, despite, between the more traditional route and the "laboratory" one, the lowest common denominator remains intact.
The chorus of "The Morning" is almost hypnotic with its "morning wake-up" riff, a textually underage-restricted theater, free from an excessively arrogant character, conscious, clear, raw, similar to an urban painting that takes shape between nocturnal vices and morning after calculations.
The transition to "Wicked Game" and "The Party & The After Party" makes the concept of musical experimentation related to the entire trilogy more precise in intention (although the Mixtape is not a true "experimental shot"), easing the 'burial' tension curve, providing a shift to more bare instrumental connotations, perfectly aligned with Tesfaye's voice (capable of conveying the more melancholic and sensual character mixed with that sense of awareness, child of the deepest Soul roots).
In "Loft Music," Hip-Hop metrics and connotations move within "listening rooms," a spectrally electric ambiance, expertly orchestrated by voice and effects (a legacy from the dear old Blake, veteran sui generis), deformed spaces, amplified listening sensation, just to leave nothing out.
A specific quality, highlighted by a contrasting sound: flourishing in detail yet afflicted in body. The sensation of emptiness proceeds alongside excesses, the impersonation of the young man squeezing life, greedily ingesting the most acclaimed mainstream dose, but it's a meal that doesn't satisfy.
The Weeknd wants more, knows that more exists, but it's not his time yet.