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Weezer

Weezer (The Red Album)

Written by: TL on 25/06/2008 18:00:19

Weezer is a band that would usually warrant a review by someone with a more than sufficient knowledge of their substantial previous material. I know a handful of their singles and little more, so I guess I can be considered a settlement in a week where we\'re trying to cover as many reviews as possible before heading off to 2008\'s Roskilde Festival.

In any case, the new \"Red Album\" doesn\'t sound extremely different from the Weezer I know, and that isn\'t a shame because for the first 6 out of 14 tracks, the band do few things wrong. \"Troublemaker\" opens things in a pretty catchy manner, but things don\'t get really interesting before the second track \"The Greatest Man Alive\" - a song where it seems that, instead of picking one style of music for the song, Weezer have gone and played it in every way they could think off. Effectively, the song starts of as rap, and proceeds through rock, choir, indie, garage and I don\'t know what else before its almost 6 minutes of length are through. Then the first single \"Pork And Beans\" treats us to a nice good old fashioned \"fuck you I\'ll do things my way\" song, however, I can\'t help but notice that Rivers Cuomo sings \"I don\'t give a _hoot_ about what you think!\". Listen to the song yourself and see if you don\'t find that a little bit ironic.

Then the next track \"Heart Songs\" seems more honest in that it name drops all the bands that influenced Rivers\' songwriting, and it\'s hard not to become a bit nostalgic when listening to it. \"Everybody Get Dangerous\" sounds like a Red Hot Chili Peppers song and comes complete with a great chorus (\"Everybody get dangerous! Booo-YAH!\"). However, after the bouncy \"Dreamin\'\" has given me weird thoughts about The Beatles, the good stuff seems to be somewhat deeper buried for a while. The next handful of songs sport Weezer trying to escape conventional song structure with crawling progressions, and so far, only \"Miss Sweeney\" has managed to get me hooked. Fortunately the album finishes strong with \"King\", which is still working the progressive style, but somehow just seems more captivating than the previous songs.

Overall, I don\'t think any of these songs will ever become a new \"My Name Is Jonas\" or \"Island In The Sun\", but aside from that, you\'ve got to give Weezer credit for putting together a highly ambitious record, which during some moments seems skizophrenic enough to give Say Anything a run for their money. I\'ll be sure to spin this some more over the next weeks, and so should you.

Download: Everybody Get Dangerous, Pork And Beans, King, Heart Songs
For The Fans Of: Say Anything, The Vines,
Listen: myspace.com/weezer

Release date 03.06.2008
Geffen Records