Rivers Cuomo is a popstar. It’s an interesting revelation considering the Weezer frontman has spent the better half of the last 25 years chasing mainstream recognition (something the band has had since releasing their first single, “Undone – The Sweater Song” in 1994), but for as many times as he’s turned his band into a modern pop-rock experiment and apologized for it on the very next album, Cuomo continues to craft unbelievable earworms, whether he’s utilizing a team of co-writers and producers or simply his strat with the lightning strap.

To understand and accept this is to be a Weezer fan. Just as it’s been noted that the singular band has essentially split into two — one putting out weird records while the other puts out, well, Weezer records — fans can rarely know what to expect when they hear new music is coming, even when it’s been described to them beforehand. Put simply, we’ve been burned before, and we’re all ready to feel like clowns the day after a new single drops and it sounds closer to Twenty One Pilots than the band that wrote “Keep Fishin’.” Still, we have a reason to be excited; it seems that the plastic, filler-ridden mid-career crisis that plagued the band in the late 2000s is over. Since 2014’s Everything Will Be Alright in the End, the band has (more or less) released consistent albums that, at the very least, keep Weezer fans guessing. While they still jet back and forth between pop-rock and expertly executed power-pop, there’s energy once again present that seemed to disappear somewhere around 2007’s self-titled red album. Weezer seem invested in the music they’re making (having averaged a new album each year since 2014), and more importantly, the records they’re making feel like Weezer records – even the weird ones. For my money, their latest is the closest the band has come to merging those two lanes; OK Human is a left-field masterpiece that comes dangerously close to reaching the heights of the band’s early career.

“You say it’s a good thing that you float in the air/That way, there’s no way I will crush your pretty toenails into a thousand pieces.”

Thus ends “Only in Dreams,”the closing track of Weezer’s 1994 debut Weezer (The Blue Album). Over time, and within the context of the song, these are words written about a girl so unforgettable, so unavoidable, that she is in the air and “in your bones.” (She’s also your ride home.) But the first time I heard this song – sometime around 2005 when I was 11 – I had absolutely no idea what those lyrics meant. I only knew that they were perfect, sounding suitably epic against the song’s explosive eight minutes.

Now, 13 studio albums into their career, fans and critics alike are still picking at Rivers Cuomo’s words as if they’re enough to justify ostracizing the band for another quarter century. Besides, they’re complete nonsense. Didn’t you read that piece about his spreadsheets? Each song is constructed to give the impression of a singular idea, but in reality, none of the words were actually written to go together. It’s all meaningless.

Read More “Weezer – Weezer (The Black Album)”

The internet giveth and the internet taketh away.

Late last May, a 14-year-old Twitter user created an account dedicated to getting Weezer, now uniquely divisive in this stage of their career, to cover “Africa,” Toto’s 1982 hit and a resurging meme in the same lineage of Smash Mouth’s “All-Star” and Owl City’s “Fireflies.” Now, eight months later, the cultural tides have shifted. “Africa” has been viciously chewed up and spit out by the merciless internet machine, largely due to the outrageous popularity that accompanied Weezer’s studio cover. The song peaked number one on the Billboard Alternative Songs chart, the band’s first number one hit since 2007’s “Pork and Beans.” The band closed shows with it, made a bizarre, self-referential music video starring Weird Al for it, and even teased the song’s release with a superior cover of another Toto single, “Rosanna.”

In less than a year, “Africa” became the sort of meme your family would recognize or bring up in casual conversation, essentially nullifying the status it once held and finalizing its new residence in the lexicon’s void.

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This is not Pinkerton.

Now that we have that out of the way, let’s examine where this 10th LP (fourth self-titled) fits within The Curious Case of Weezer.

To many, Weezer are hacks; they’re notorious for “selling out” (whatever that means), a band who’s switched not only styles but a frontman who famously experimented with hundreds of songwriting methods just to reach the heights of the band’s classic debut, Weezer (The Blue Album). But it’s what’s happened between the time of The Blue Album and now that makes the band (and their enigmatic frontman, Rivers Cuomo) so endearing. There was critical success followed by critical failure; addiction followed by isolation, all in the name of goofy songs like “Hash Pipe” and “Island in the Sun.” There was celibacy, meditation, marriage, divorce, a Lil Wayne feature, and a “return to form” all in the past two decades.

Read More “Weezer – Weezer (The White Album)”

Let it go. Weezer’s days of recording classic material that ranks anywhere near their self-titled “blue” album or Pinkerton are done; that Weezer sound is dead. Yet, that anticipation from fans everywhere has continued upon the arrival of each new Weezer record. Five albums into their new millennium comeback and well, nothing has changed: Rivers Cuomo and his band of brothers are still recording goofball pop music with joyful rhythms and tepid lyrics… and by now, you’d be ignorant to believe it will change. Raditude is Weezer’s seventh full-length release and their most widely-collaborative effort. After last year’s third self-titled “red” album failed to impress many fans with the band’s experimental side, Weezer changed things up and hired veteran pop producer Butch Walker to helm the boards, as well as co-write a few songs. Jacknife Lee was also brought back, and despite their last effort’s lack of appeal, the band stuck with a few ideas that continue to amplify their teamwork mantra (for example, all members share songwriting duties).