After 30 years as a band, Weezer finally took the terrible but inevitable trip to a place called “Cuomoville”—that is, a song from the band’s four-part SZNZ slog where Rivers Cuomo sang of his homestead like the fabled setting of some Shakespearean saga. Despite the thrash-metal bridge, the band sounded utterly exhausted, their what-are-we-doing-here sigh audible amid the plod. Weezer soon decided the time had come for drastic change. For the last decade, the quartet has struggled through concept records that better bands would have simply laughed at in the group chat before moving on to most anything else—a covers album that included Toto and TLC, a pandemic-era orchestral lark where the delicate textures only highlighted the extreme lyrical blunders, the aforementioned series of four seasonal EPs that began with a Vivaldi interpolation and ended, at least for me, with vexing questions about how much of my life I waste listening to music I do not enjoy. These records felt like the wages of self-indulgence, the products of a band who had forgotten how to just be that.
So Weezer graciously decided to scrap the goofball gimmicks and return to the business of making rock records, a story they’ve told more than once this millennium. They hired two new producers, pop Swede and Ghost conjurer Klas Åhlund and Los Angeles-based beatmaker and Geese whisperer Kenneth Blume. They went to new studios and found a new duet partner who was born two months after Pinkerton polarized Weezer world. They all got in a room to record at the same time, cranking amps and eschewing click tracks. But perhaps most importantly, drummer Patrick Wilson, who co-wrote “My Name Is Jonas” so long ago, returned to the songwriting fray, collaborating with Rivers Cuomo and taking on two songs himself. In fact, the first single from the band’s seventh self-titled album is Wilson’s “Shine Again,” a stomping tantrum about the tedium of life capped by an optimistic outlook: Maybe we can all be happy again, perhaps even great together, if we can just remember how good this all used to feel.
No score yet, be the first to add.
Weezer indeed sounds a lot like vintage Weezer here, simply polished and toughened by these new hires. Blume insisted he wanted to make a “violent” Weezer record, and these 10 songs are often massive and thrashing—rhythm guitars that sound like buzzsaws, solos that spill out as late middle-age vexations, drums that feel like holes punched in drywall. The writing, on the other hand, is vulnerable and open, as though, en route to the studio, Cuomo stopped by the costume shop to drop off the clingy body armor of cleverness he’d worn for far too long. The entire band, for better and worse, is so honest here that the writing often feels like a real-life pressure valve, guileless and plain.
But this revanchism reinforces two things about Weezer that have made the band feel stylistically static for three decades, no matter the occasional electropop flirtation or glam-rock indulgence: As melodicists stuck between childhood loves of KISS and Cheap Trick, the quartet has more members than they have distinct and effective ways to shape hooks. And as lyricists, they remain condescending complainers, celebrities with the gift of mostly appearing anonymous who nevertheless still look at the world around them and think, “I’m so much better than that.” Turns out, just as child is father of man, Weezer (Blue Album) is the father of the Weezer (Gold Album), an album about being four old men trying to, well, shine again.
