The Weeknd – House Of Balloons

Let’s assume Rebecca Black‘s ‘Friday’ is the nail in contemporary R&B’s coffin. Or rather, Kanye’s ‘Love Lockdown’ was the nail, and ‘Friday’ is the dirt shovelled on top. I know there’s debate over whether ‘Friday’ is actually a real song, but the fact that we’re not sure tells us that R&B has got itself a serious problem. I find myself listening to Radio 1 or Capital, hearing Taio Cruz or Bruno Mars, and shouting ‘Where is the creativity? Where is the ambition?’ at the little box that sits on my work surface. My housemates normally exit the room shortly after my outbursts muttering something about me thinking I’m a big shot because I‘ve found a voice on the internet.

The Weeknd - House Of Balloons

And there’s some truth in that. I can sit here screaming my throat horse about how rubbish the R&B scene is these days, but the truth is I gave up on it so long ago now that I still think ‘Make Love In This Club’ has never really been matched. So perhaps the reason I don’t ‘get it’ is simply because I don’t understand it anymore. But, on the contrary, as a middleclass white boy from Essex, I think I’ve been exposed to enough mainstream R&B that I’ve at least some understanding of how the genre functions. The truth is, if you spend your days listening to Radio 1, the R&B you’ll hear feels contrived and prostituted, devoid of any real originality, produced simply to be functionary, something we hear that reminds us of something we heard in Gatecrasher or Oceana.

But before you rip down your Marvin Gaye poster and throw your copy of The Writing’s On The Wall into the bin, proclaiming “well, what’s the bloody point then?”, all hope is not lost. The immense reception that Kanye West’s latest instalment, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, received clearly shows us that not only can ambitious R&B still exist, but that people are out there waiting for it. Here enters The Weeknd with thier debut effort House Of Balloons, first aptly introduced to us by Drake, another artist who is striving to generate exciting new ideas in the world of hip-hop and R&B.

The album is stunningly produced, capturing the nocturnal vibes that The XX’s mercury award winning album used so well. What makes House Of Balloons special is the fusion we hear between innovative electronic beats and contemporary R&B, creating a sound that is powerfully original, yet warmly familiar. This is in every respect a modern R&B record, utilising those recurrent themes of sex, money and drugs, and pulling them off with smooth coolness. The sound is sexy and addictive, but also bitter, moody, and at times even bleak. The Weeknd’s real strength, however, comes from a refusal to settle on these R&B frameworks, and we hear this rejection time and time again through the album. The melodies are constantly undercut but heavy bass drops or intelligently woven sonic foundations, and it’s this suggestion that R&B can still surprise us that makes this record so interesting.

House Of Balloons is full of stand out tracks, and it’s got that rare ability to change your favourite song after almost every listen. Opening anthem ‘High For This’ introduces almost all of the ideas that Abel Tesfaye is playing with, but the deeply dark ‘Wicked Games’ or the unsurpassable ‘The Party and the After Party’ take them in different directions. ‘What You Need’ is probably the furthest from R&B that we get on the album, indulging far further into the realms of post-dubstep, making it the perfect introduction to The Weeknd’s sound. The track radiates Burial influences, which is always a good thing to hear, and other acts like How To Dress Well share this forward thinking.

The way James Blake fuses the electronic with soul is mirrored by the way The Weeknd fuses it with R&B. Together the pair are perfect examples of ambition and innovation within controlled and overdone genres. When we think about James Blake’s success, and we listen to The Weeknd’s almost flawless debut, we really get a sense that there’s no excuse for our radio playing the manufactured music that it does, and certainly not for the lazy artists that make it.

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