Vikings & Beekeepers

 

I wasn’t going to write on this. Or at least I didn’t think I was, but Tyson’s comment on my post on the Band (way to stay on topic, Tyson!) made me kind sit up and think ‘Hey, if this stupid band was so supposedly important to me, why wouldn’t I write something?’

So yes, the new Weezer album is out on Tuesday. It’s self-titled and will henceforth be referred to as, sigh, The Red Album. I’ve heard the whole thing and it’s…it’s…well, let’s talk about that.

I’ve made no bones about the fact Pinkerton is my favorite album of all time, and that the Blue Album is a close second. Critics used to blast Weezer as being a major label Pavement, and it wasn’t until recently that I realized that that was exactly what I liked about Pinkerton. It had all the offbeat humor and fuck-all, off-the-cuff playing of a Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain or Wowee Zowee, but it also contained the supercharged heft of a Nevermind or In Utero. Weezer and Pavement even conducted themselves in similar fashions: SM taking petty shots at the Smashing Pumpkins and Stone Temple Pilots on “Range Life,” Rivers Cuomo taking a playful poke at Green Day on “El Scorcho.” The difference for me was that Cuomo had a better sense of melody and, like I said, Weezer just rocked more (or simply more often – “Stereo” just slays). Pinkerton and the Blue Album were the two most influential albums for me as a kid and there’s way too much loaded nostalgia and autobiographical importance for them to ever be dethroned.

So I was a part of that group that made Pinkerton one of the biggest cult album’s of the 90s and essentially spawned Weezer’s 2001 comeback. My take on everything since has been that the Green Album was a bland, uninspired pop punk album that didn’t require much effort because of the built in audience; I felt Maladroit was a bit of an apology for Green’s lack of dynamics, but still didn’t really have very strong songs; Make Believe was essentially where I checked out.

Of course, three years have gone by since Make Believe, an album that’s stuffed to the gills with purely awful ideas, and absence makes the heart grow morbidly curious. No longer am I cautiously optimistic about each new Weezer release, hoping that this album will be their retribution; I’m now open-mindedly pessimistic, prepared to hate it, but waiting to hear it all before dismissing it outright.

So I approached the thought of a new Weezer album with the same kind of anticipation a prisoner being sent to the electric chair would approach his imminent demise: no way around it, this is going to suck some serious dick, but maybe it’ll be quick and painless.

Listening to The Red Album has been, at times, an immensely, immeasurably painful experience, but there’s been a little bit of an epiphany that has gone along with it.

This isn’t the Weezer that I grew up with (duh). They’re simply a competent, fitfully passable radio rock band.

No one begrudges the Foo Fighters for being adequate commercial rockers, so maybe we need to take the Weezer of our past and keep them there. Let’s just let this decade’s incarnation cash their cheques and occasionally commit a marginal single to modern radio.

The truth is that Weezer are sick of being your childhood favorite. Now all they want to do is be you rock n’ roll guilty pleasure. And the Red Album is that attempt at full blown pleasurable guilt (the Village People cover should have been my first hint).

  

So how’s the actual album? Well, there’s been talk about it being a quirkier affair than the past three albums and it certainly is. Cuomo’s lyrics bristle with a whole lot of ironic detachment and pop culture references. There’s also some real effort made to break up the stylistic monotony, with Cuomo handing the vocal duties over to his band mates on several tracks and also trying his hand at rap (“Cold Dark World”) and full blown “Bohemian Rhapsody” style rock opera (“The Greatest Man That Ever Lived (Variations On A Shaker Hymn)”).

The results are unsurprisingly varied (and probably mercifully varied – the whole album could have been one united turd, instead, it’s only a partial turd). Red opens promisingly enough. “Troublemaker” is above-average power pop tripe, with some legitimate hooks and a genuine sense of fun. “Greatest Man,” the grand statement, is comparable to Green Day’s “Jesus Of Suburbia” in its attempts of loosely, sloppily throwing together a half dozen or so random song snippets to form one long “masterpiece.” It ain’t no masterpiece, but parts of the song really sparkle in that way that way way way overproduced rock bands can sometimes sparkle (just try and ignore the spoken word bridge). “Pork And Beans,” the big single that got everyone thinking that the album might not totally suck after all, begins with an acoustic guitar figure that not-so-subtly recalls “El Scorcho.” If nothing else, it’s the best single the group have released since “Island In The Sun,” that light-as-air heartbreaker that nearly saved the Green Album. With the help of a legitimately enjoyable and humorous Internet-celebrity aided video, “Pork And Beans” is Cuomo’s meta-radio hit about being told by his label to provide a surefire single for the album. Well, it’s a winner in the same way that the aforementioned Foo Fighters were able to provide your local KROC type station with a song that would make you stop flipping the dial for a couple of minutes.

The knock against these three songs and every song that follows is that the lyrics are uniformly terrible. Rhyming couplets like “Put me in a special school / ‘Cuz I am such a fool” and “Turn off the TV / ‘Cuz that’s what others see / And movies are as bad as eating choc-o–late ice cream” are simply not meant to be heard by the public. At the very least, “Greatest Man’s” cheeseball braggadocio and “Pork And Beans’” ultra-square name-dropping (big upping Oakleys sunglasses?) are done with tongue aggressively planted in cheek, thus making them partially forgivable. Unfortunately, that kind of detachment doesn’t forgive lyrical laziness and the rest of the album really suffers because of it.

“Heart Songs” probably fails most spectacularly in Cuomo’s ultra sincere attempts at honoring the music of his youth. Cuomo quotes, describes and name drops many of his favorite artists, including Gordon Lightfoot, Iron Maiden, Debbie Gibson and Eddie Rabbit among way too many others. The song especially goes awry when Cuomo begins singing about his discovery of the most influential band of his career, Nirvana. The lyrics sound like an overly simplified Wikipedia entry: “Back in 1991 / I wasn’t having any fun / ‘Til my roommate said ‘Come on and put a brand new record on’ / It had a baby on it / He was naked on it.” Unbelievably painful. Probably the most tragic thing about “Heart Songs” is that it wastes one of the stronger, most emotional melodies Cuomo has written in his career.

As much of a failure as “Heart Songs” is, it’s still not as bad as the sub-Chili Peppers dreck of “Everybody Get Dangerous,” which discusses such “dangerous” acts as cow tipping and playing ice hockey without pads (in Canada, it’s called “shinny”). My assumption is that the lyrics are another attempt at ironic parody of rock star excess or something. But if you take a shit, there’s no way you can get away with saying “Yeah, but it’s okay because my shit is mocking someone else’s shit.” No, it’s still shit. And it stinks.

Another area of incompetence is “Thought I Knew,” Brian Bell’s jaw-droppingly inept attempt at a lead vocal where the band ends up sounding like The Wallflowers or a bad version of Fastball, that group that did “The Way” (yeah, I just referenced Fastball. Jealous?). “Automatic,” drummer Pat Wilson’s solo foray, is certainly better, but it’s still not that good.

Both “Dreamin’” and “The Angel And The One” fare far better, the former sounding like a mid-90s Weezer b-side (okay, c-side, it’s no “I Just Threw Out The Love Of My Dreams” or “Mykel And Carli,” but it holds some similarities) and the latter taking the slow-burn emo-but-not-complete-shite route. It may be against my better judgment, but “The Angel And The One,” which closes the album (that is, if you wisely skip the bonus track, an awful cover of “The Weight”), is possibly the closest thing the band has come to real live emotional heft in the last 10 years. If nothing else, Cuomo still knows how to belt out big, ultra-serious Mineral/Sunny Day-style emo like nobody’s business. Props where props are due, the guy gets it right in the end.

So yeah, all in all, it’s an incredible mixed bag. The cup’s half full or half empty depending on how forgiving one is of the band’s middle-of-the-road rockers. Much of the album is undeniably atrocious, very little of it is legitimately good and the rest is a big steaming ball of goodwill inspired guilty pleasure.

The album’s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness: irony. Almost every song is steeped in the stuff and I think it’s meant to be a signifier of what we like best about Weezer - you know, the whole nerd rock thing. But it almost seems like a crutch for weak, formulaic, downright insulting lyricism. Perhaps Cuomo needs to take a page from Red’s best track, “The Angel And The One,” and get all serious and introspective again. But the truth is, that’s not going to happen, Weezer have flipped sides on the art/commerce coin, but it’s not the end of the world. To have two cherished albums by one band is rare; to have two cherished albums plus a smattering of other passable tracks is just icing. We got more than we deserve with this band, they’re free to suck or not suck as they please. The Red Album isn’t a “return to form,” but it isn’t a big “fuck you” to the fans either. It’s just their way of saying, “It’s time to move on, Carson. No hard feelings.”

This entry was posted on Friday, May 30th, 2008 at 3:33 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.