Weezer, the 10th album by Weezer, is about as good (or bad, your call) as Weezer, several measures worse than Weezer and a once-you-hear-it, you’ll-never-unhear-it skid mark on the shorts of Weezer. If that sentence needs color-decoding, don’t waste your time—just go on turning Californian, gawking at “L.A. Girlz” or, more likely, stabbing stop as quickly as possible.
Further dissection of this fourth and most pallid chromatic chromosome in Rivers Cuomo’s rapidly unraveling musical DNA would be as pointless and obscene as autopsying a baby inside a dingo. It should be objectively obvious that this is terrible, often abominable music, and to anyone with any affinity for Weezer’s first two LPs—hell, even the next two—more obvious why. The truly devastating and impregnable question is how: How did we get here?
Forget for a moment the pathetic infantilism of 40-something rockers devoting an entire record to behavior that lands one on watch lists: hanging out with kids and getting away with girls. How does such a sharp, funny, honest observer of the teenage condition become so hollow and tone deaf to it? How did Cuomo go from “I asked you to go to the Green Day concert/You said you never heard of them” to “We could ride a Greyhound/All the way to the Galápagos”? To “Just a couple lovebirds/Happy to be singing” from “I’ve got your letter/You’ve got my song”?
How does the pilot of so many world-turning, round-robin, fourth-chorus lifto ffs crash into Max Martin mountain over and over and over? How do three actually passable nu-Weezer songs (“Summer Elaine And Drunk Dori,” “Jacked Up” and “Endless Bummer,” all in the last four tracks) get jackknifed by the most willfully imbecilic side-one cash grab in all Weezerdom? And just how smart does Matt Sharp look now?
There are no answers. Not even Cuomo knows, if his comments are to be believed. (“I’m proud of the demented lyrics that are like, ‘What? Who says that? Who thinks that? What planet am I on? I don’t know, but I kinda wanna stay!’”) That he subtitled it The White Album is the cherry on top of a quadruple-scoop shit sundae. This album is brown.
—Noah Bonaparte Pais
