Weezer

Everything Will Be Alright In The End

Written by: TL on 20/10/2014 19:33:40

If curious music fans these days were to dive into Weezer's history, they'd be likely to find stories about how the band emerged to widespread attention already when debuting with their first self-titled album in 1994, only to split waters widely with 96's "Pinkerton", which some hold as the band's most intense work, while the band's frontman - dorky bespectacled white guy Rivers Cuomo - supposedly regrets the album's existance - though that is far from the strangest thing you can read about Cuomo. That was all in the nineties though, and since I started covering the band in 08 on their third self-titled record (the red one), Weezer have been committed to writing quirky, yet easily accessible pop-rock, with witty lyricism and rumbling distortion mostly kept in the mix to keep the band sounding alternative to what you'd consider straight up radio rock.

In this department, it's been a steady but only very slight decline in quality over the course of 09's occasionally entertaining "Raditude" and 10's relatively forgetable "Hurley", yet while things hardly change as much as some would claim on the new "Everything Will Be Alright In The End", you can at least credit Weezer for cooking up a solid portion of songs that are inescapably catchy. "Back To The Shack" sits atop the pile with lyrics that start out by apologising for forgetting about the merits of rock and advocating that people "turn off those stupid singing shows", of course with mid-tempo rock drumming and chunky riffage to boot. "The British Are Coming" is another well-picked single, which gives you a feeling of "what the hell is he talking about?" when Cuomo sings "punk ass red coats trying to run the show" yet the oddity of the song only helps it stick to your mind exactly the way a straight up pop song does.

These are the songs that work the best, those where Cuomo has you trying to trace his peculiar and often irony-laced musings while you're getting hooked on the melody. "Ain't Got Nobody" and "Cleopatra" could be mentioned in this category as well. A song like "Lonely Girl" however, has such pointlessly simple boy-courts-girl lyrics that it feels kitsch, making you wonder if Weezer aren't really just the 2014 version of Beatles during their annoying period (when they wrote "Eight Days A Week" and "Love Me Do" and so on). In your imagination, it becomes easy to picture an American Bandstand 2014 in which Cuomo and his well-dressed friends tap feet and perform with robotic smiles in front of cluelessly whining teenage fans.

The likely truth of things is though, that Weezer has been content for some time with simply writing fun, catchy tunes and leaving it at that. They keep the garage-ish rumble and dodgy soloing in there, underneath the polished production, and they're still just rebellious enough end the record with a three-part sequence where "I. The Waste Land" and "III. Return To Ithaka" are pretty much two minutes of indulgent soloing each, but the mainstay of "Everything Will Be Alright In The End" is still tamed distortion and repetitive melodic choruses én masse. Which makes for a listening experience that is on one hand completely satisfying and consistently "not boring", but at the same time also one that feels rather shallow and quickly forgetable. In other words, it's the same kind of record as the last three, except probably a noticeably stronger one track for track than "Hurley" for instance.

7

Download: Back To The Shack, The British Are Coming, Cleopatra, Ain't Got Nobody
For The Fans Of: Piebald, Superchunk, Weatherbox
Listen: facebook.com/weezer

Release date 07.10.2014
Republic

Related Items | How we score?
Comments
comments powered by Disqus

Legal

© Copyright MMXXIV Rockfreaks.net.