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Burndt Jamb

Thursday, July 24, 2008

“Burndt Jamb” is, without question, one of Maladroit’s finest tunes. It’s got a summery jazz-funk groove to it, the likes of which the band has seldom attempted prior or since. Rivers’ lyric, while simple, is decently effective, contrasting the bright pop milieu against some humdrum mopery.  It’s essentially three brief verses, the first of which referencing “gothic flavor” (uh?), and the best (third) of which goes, “And the water / Running over / Me is growing / Ever colder.” The brevity of the lyric also highlights how this is a structural oddity in the Weezer catalogue: a verse, an instrumental rockout chorus, a sweet solo and an outro that’s all grace. Cuomo bragged about the nontraditional songforms the band was exploring during the Red Album sessions, but in truth, Weezer was already getting into some pretty weird stuff as early as Maladroit (weird for Weezer, anyway). On “Burndt Jamb,” it works.

Tons of versions of this song are in circulation. There is the live cut that is available as a b-side to the UK “We Are All On Drugs” CD single, which is remarkable for both Scott Shriner’s awesome bass intro and the band’s extended outro (adding nearly two minutes to the album version, this is Weezer in rare jam band mode), and Cuomo’s absurd Maladroit-era stage banter. Also, there appears to be a sort inhaling sound effect on the instrumental chorus — stoner humor, perhaps.

We also have three different attempts from the Maladroit sessions, all done in quick succession during January of 2002. Th earliest, 1/08, begins with a jammy tune-up (Cuomo counts into the song in German), and is best described as a looser, instrumental take (including a second, extended solo). By 1/10, the song had developed a modest bass intro and some lyrics that I vastly prefer to the album version’s (“Now you want me, and you need me / I have got to get to leavin’ / If you move on down that highway / I’ll be burning, I’ll be there” — one of the better arguments for Cuomo’s free associative lyric improv of the early aughts). Finally, the 1/11 version begins with some unintelligible band banter, including Scott’s remark that he has his “lucky shark’s foot.” By this point, the extended guitar solo outro was still intact, so where exactly this bit changed is unknown.

But that’s not all! We have not just one but two versions of this song performed with former Weezer bassist Mikey Welsh, in the song’s earliest inception. The first is from the 5/27/01 DC Demos, which begins with some theatrical bong hits and the lead vocal melody tied to a simple, wordless “doo doo doo” — in all, it shows rather interestingly that, regardless of the changes the band attempted when Scott entered the picture, the album version’s structure was pretty much set in stone more than half a year prior (no second solo here). They also attempted the song a second time with Mikey for a 6/13/01 BBC session, which is similar but for the extra reverb. Both versions showcase how Mikey was a far more talented and creative bass player than many credit him, though I have a hard time choosing whose bassline I prefer. Both are great and suit the song well.

Also, some have noted how the main riff from “Burndt Jamb” sounds an awful like that of George Benson’s “Breezin” (there’s that jazz-funk), and for a moment the similarity is a bit disconcerting (no doubt Cuomo cribbed from here), but they soon diverge.

Filed in Live B-Sides, Maladroit, The Grand Playlist | | Comments (38)

Velouria

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

“Velouria” dropped at an interesting time in the Weezer chronology. A cover of a Pixies tune, it was recorded in 1998 and released, finally, in June of 1999 on the Where Is My Mind? tribute album. It was, after spring 1997’s excellent Good Life EP, the first Weezer song to be officially released in over two years. It’s also significant for the fact that it is the band’s first released recording with second bassist Mikey Welsh, who replaced Matt Sharp after he defected to focus on the Rentals’ protracted Seven More Minutes sessions.

Although it may have been bittersweet to have waited so long to only get a cover, it must have been electrifying to know that Weezer was back to recording. It doesn’t hurt that this is a fantastic performance across the board: Rivers and Brian’s voices have never sounded finer, the band is in top rocking form, and they manage to take the Pixies classic and make it their own. The band plays with deep feeling, and to my ears, Weezer’s production has never sounded better — the mix is clear, the instruments are well defined, and everything is in its right place. While not showcasing any of Rivers’ songwriting from this era (the mysterious 1997-1999 period, that all signs point to having been a lost grail), it certainly must have given the impression that despite a commercial flop and an estranged founding member, Weezer had not missed a beat in the downtime, and were poised to come back stronger than ever.

Interestingly, this comes from an August 1998 session at Mouse House Studios, in LA. At least four other (original) songs were attempted, but we know nothing of them to date other than the titles, for which two are remarkable: “Trampoline” (a word present in the first line of “Velouria” — a connection, perhaps?), and “Disco Queen” (simply because it sounds interesting, especially in the context of Weezer).

Filed in Covers, The Very Best | | Comments (49)

Dreamin’

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

As it happens, the song Cuomo referred to as “Daydreamer” in his notes on “This Is The Way” wound up being titled “Dreamin.” That’s not all that had changed: instead of being 6 minutes long, it clocks in at a trimmer 5:12. And “Dreamin'” is perhaps the finest example of Cuomo’s tendency to overstate his talents: the song is not “epic,” neither “symphonic,” nor “bold” or “gigantic.” And I would certainly not call it an “art song.”

At first, it seems like Cuomo might deliver on his word. There’s a synth-string and feedback intro that tantalizes the listener for a full 15 seconds…which eventually breaks into a chord progression that Cuomo has already used on relatively straightforward songs like 2005’s “Hold Me” and 1996’s “Why Bother?,” with a vocal melody and lyrics that, aside from being ridiculously amateur, might very well have been inspired by the Bagel Bites commercial (“I’m dreamin’ in the mornin’ / I’m dreamin’ all through the night / And when I’m dreamin’, I know that it’s all right,” versus “Pizza in the mornin’, pizza in the evening, pizza at suppertime / When pizza’s on a bagel, you can eat pizza anytime” — even the rhyme scheme is the same!).

The verses, thankfully, are a little bit better. While sung from the perspective of a high schooler upset with his parents and teachers (c’mon, Rivers…), there are some maturer themes to be sussed in the “family of [his] own” that he’ll someday have, and a nice personal reference to the Widener Stacks library at Harvard, where Cuomo studied. Finally, at 1:51, we hear Cuomo begin to come into his element (with some nice backups by Brian Bell) above some tastefully sloppy drumming from Pat Wilson, just like the days of yore. There’s a slow build, and then…

Well, and then there’s perhaps the weirdest little section of music in Weezer history. Everything breaks down and, rather suddenly, we are treated to Bell singing lead about a “dream sequence” in a meadow, replete with birds chirping and a simple guitar line that seems to mimic the gentle ripples that the goslings make as they paddle along the river (yes, Bell actually sings the word “goslings”). Cuomo joins in for a rather funny sequence of dream-like echoes, as he sings about running through the meadow below angels watching on high. At last, the song begins to build more momentum and, with a triumphant cymbal crash, we enter boom-chop arena rock heaven. Not bad for a song that began with bagels.

Still, some things are kind of inexplicable and annoying. The band’s decision to spoil the wonderful ending by adding in a 15-second outro where Cuomo abruptly and obnoxiously intones, “I don’t wanna get with your program,” is almost offensive in context (and obviously indebted to the ugliest tendencies of Green Day’s overwrought comeback album American Idiot). Elsewhere, the riff that interrupts the “dream sequence” has symbolic significance — it is supposed to represent the harsh reality encroaching on Cuomo’s imagination, which he soon disregards and continues spacing out — but musically, it’s so jarring and basic that it can only be counted to the song’s detriment. I like the idea, but wish they had thought of a better way to convey it.

And so, “Dreamin'” just about sums up The Red Album: wildly inconsistent with what fans were lead to expect, and a mish-mash of strange concepts that sometimes work but often don’t. At the very least, one can tell that the band is clearly enthusiastic and enjoying themselves in the studio for the first time this decade.

Filed in The Grand Playlist, The Red Album | | Comments (49)

This Is The Way

Monday, July 21, 2008

The buildup to The Red Album was pretty immense. After the success of Make Believe, it wasn’t unreasonable to expect a quick turnaround for the next record: in Weezer’s history, success has always made for quick follow-ups (The Blue Album gave rise to Pinkerton in a customary two years, while The Green Album‘s smash produced Maladroit in less than half that time), and precedent didn’t suggest the next record would arrive three whole years after Weezer’s biggest single to date.

But that’s how long it took. I’m not quite sure what the rumor mill was up to during the first year and a half of waiting, but after the leak of the demo of “Pig” — a song many hailed the best Rivers Cuomo composition of this decade — it was bustling. Official band webmaster and historian Karl Koch remarked that studio sessions had begun in “a large room that normally doesn’t serve as a place where bands record their albums.” While this wound up being a theater, fans conjectured that (along with the intensely thematic and refined subject matter of “Pig”) this could be a barn, and that Weezer’s sixth effort would be a farm animal concept album (had they known about “The Spider,” that would’ve only bolstered speculation). Theories grew even more complex and excited when news hit that all band members would be singing — something that had not been attempted since Songs From The Black Hole, Cuomo’s unfinished space rock opera that wound up being pared down and re-envisioned as Pinkerton. Of course, multiple vocalists meant multiple perspectives (like the Black Hole songs had employed), which seemed to corroborate the concept album theory.

Then came “This Is The Way.” Cuomo had been compiling and sequencing a selection of old demos from 1992-2007 to serve as a sort of stopgap release, which was released under his name as Alone: The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo. The one song on the tracklist from the post-Make Believe era would be heavily analyzed as something of a sampling for what was to come.

When the record leaked, pandemonium ensued on the Weezer fanboards. It is, simply put, an R&B ballad — complete with a drum machine beat, a cheesy synth progression, a sleazy guitar line, and an intro that has Rivers deadpanning, “This is the way, baby: This is the way.” The sad fanboy dream of an ambitious animal farm concept album quickly withered and died.

The lyrics tell the trite tale of a girl being abused by a boyfriend, and Cuomo, the hot-blooded hetero-protagonist, offers his services in setting her free. But the songwriting flies beneath that of most actual Top 40 R&B fare, and has amusingly birthed more than one message board theory about how the song is actually about anal sex (one of the few ways to make this song engaging at all). If taken as a parody, it’s a pretty entertaining little joke, but seeing how the song trudges through 4 minutes and 17 seconds without so much as the hint of a wink, it seems that Cuomo’s gesture is sincere. After all, this is the man who, during the Maladroit era, co-wrote and performed on a hit single by nu metal garbage bin Cold, tried to ghostwrite a tune for Enrique Iglesias, and at least considered collaborating with Fred Durst (if a recording exists, may God grant that it never sees the light of day).

When the Alone CD hit stores, the liner notes offered some minor reassurance. Cuomo unapologetically revealed that the song was founded on a progression/beat lifted pretty directly from Mario’s 2004 hit “Let Me Love You,” which was at once both a relief and even more embarrassing. But luckily (and rather tantalizingly), Cuomo promised that “an epic, 6-minute, symphonic type of art song” tentatively titled “Daydreamer” (later “Dreamin'”) would be released on the forthcoming album instead of this lame duck. His dismissive description of the “Way” demo — “a straight-ahead, nothing-fancy, middle-of-the-road, urban pop type of song” — made it seem that he didn’t care much for it, either.

And yet, Cuomo’s detailed chronicle contained the frightening admission that the other three members of the band wanted “This Is The Way” on the record instead of “Daydreamer.” Cuomo apparently insisted on the inclusion of “Daydreamer,” so “This Is The Way” was cut — even though, hilariously, bassist Scott Shriner desperately wanted the song to be on the album, saying, “I want to sing that song. I can own it.” Wouldn’t that be interesting to hear!

And who knows? We just might: Cuomo’s notes on the song conclude that “This Is The Way” might just end up on Album 7.

Filed in Alone, Deliverance At Hand!, The Very Worst | | Comments (45)

Haunt You Every Day

Thursday, July 17, 2008

Whereas Cuomo boasted on the Rivers Correspondence Board of “world domination” and the “millions of new fans” that would be replacing his current ones after 2001’s triumphant return, Maladroit‘s immediate failure quickly cut at the heels of Cuomo’s engorged ego and the band’s renewed confidence. While sessions for Weezer’s fifth outing had begun a couple of months before the fourth one’s release, the inability of “Dope Nose” and “Keep Fishin'” to make any more of an impact than modest chartings in U.S. Modern Rock stopped the sessions in their tracks. Word of Album Five’s quick arrival were soon silenced.

That silence sustained over the next couple of years, until word began to spread that Weezer was working with producer Rick Rubin. For the third time in a row, Weezer released an album in the second week of May, this time in 2005. After three long, unexpected years of waiting, Make Believe had finally arrived.

I thought about introducing this album with “Beverly Hills,” the first single (and sampling) of the record that the fans could hear, but ultimately, I think “Haunt You Every Day” is a better metaphor for Make Believe as a whole. It was born out of a song experiment wherein Rubin told Cuomo to write a song “like Elton John or Billy Joel,” which Cuomo says failed, but did get him to write his first song written on the piano (one wonders if that means “Longtime Sunshine” and “I Do” were written on guitar then transferred to piano, or if Cuomo was simply forgetting/disregarding those songs…I would think the latter).

From a songwriting perspective, it’s one of the better songs the band has come up with in the new millennium. Musically, it’s a melancholy melange of heavy-hearted piano chords and an eerie guitar lead, which explodes in the chorus (classic quiet/loud structure), amid a tortured, yearning guitar groan and some surprisingly nice counterpoint in Brian Bell’s backing vocal. The guitar solo even sounds like something that could have fit on Pinkerton, if not just a bit dog-leashed, as does the second guitar solo with Cuomo’s vocal scatting on the outro (reminds me a little bit of how Matt Sharp sang along to the solo of “El Scorcho,” albeit in a much darker context). The lyrics are filled with some pretty painful cliches and easy rhymes (“I don’t feel the joy / I don’t feel the pain / You were just a toy / I am just insane”), but Cuomo’s heartfelt inflection (present on Make Believe, for the first time on a Weezer record since ’96) and some nice imagery make it passable.

Still, something is terribly, terribly off here – the production. The mix. The sound of it. It’s as though one were applying Green production to Pinkerton songs (well, not Pinkerton per se). In fact, Make Believe is even more polished and shiny than Green — it’s sterile. Precious little life can be found within these tracks, so airtight and mechanical that it sounds like the work of studio androids. And for the first time in three records, one can say that Cuomo can’t be entirely blamed for this failing: this time, it’s the production that really sucks the life out of the songs. With Green and Maladroit, the songs had hardly any soul to begin with; here, whatever soul there was once has been thoroughly ironed out.

Which is not to say that all songs on Make Believe are, from a songwriting perspective, as pretty darn good as “Haunt You Every Day.” But, from best to worst, with this album, everything is just slightly off, for one reason or another. Most of the time, that reason concerns production.

Starting with Pinkerton, Weezer has always, in time, regretted the album they made. With that one, Rivers felt it was too personal, akin to getting drunk, having a cathartic moment of self-revelation at a party, then waking up the following morning and realizing how badly you embarrassed yourself (his words, not mine). With Green, the band would fess up to the production being too glossy and the songs being underdeveloped. Around the time of Make Believe‘s release, a typically diplomatic Bell admitted that on Maladroit, “the band’s tight, and we’re playing riffs. It [could] have been an album of that. Instead, I’m a bit confused when I hear it…I like some of the material on it, but the sound of it doesn’t do much for me.” And by the time of The Red Album, bassist Scott Shriner would explain Make Believe as simply having been “where our heads were at at the time.”

Interestingly enough, in a press release shortly after Make Believe‘s release, Bell was already saying that he wished they could re-record this song to be more like the way they played it on subsequent tours. A perusal of the few versions available at Weerez don’t seem to reveal any particular difference, however. Perhaps he was chalking it up to the production, too.

Filed in Make Believe, The Grand Playlist | Tagged | Comments (38)

Love Explosion

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

I pondered for a few moments on how to introduce Maladroit, and “Love Explosion” wound up being what I chose. This may seem like a bit of a dubious call to anyone familiar with the album, what with it being one of the less-remembered, late-album tracks…But I’m confident that I have good reason.

I’ve always found Maladroit to be a multi-directional mess, and for its very lack of focus (and a fair share of the worst songs Weezer has ever released), I put it in close contention for being the worst record of Weezer’s career (Make Believe may just take the title; I’ll decide somewhere down the line of this blog). In part, I think the fact that it was banged out and released in less than a year after Green can be blamed for that — it was put out much too suddenly, before Green had even fallen off the charts, and its commercial failure killed the momentum and enthusiasm the band had accrued in the wake of “Hash Pipe” and “Island in the Sun.”

Secondly, the band weren’t sure just what the hell they were doing. After many hardcore fans had all but given up on Weezer after their drastic change of sound in 2001, Rivers began to get a little more self-conscious, and with the help of the aptly-named forum member Asschun, set up the Rivers Correspondence Board. Here Rivers was just as schizoid as the album this era produced, at times earnestly asking fans if they thought that “Weezer, as a whole, choked” when they made The Green Album, at other times claiming that filler like “Crab” single-handedly scorched anything from their first two albums. In any event, roughly a dozen fans were hastily chosen and, through band assistant Karl Koch, corresponded with Rivers about an ongoing series of session recordings posted to the band’s official website. These fans would effectively work as “unofficial producers” (a job for which most of them, if not all, were completely unqualified), critiquing everything from lyrical changes to vocal delivery to the contour of specific guitar solos. Everything was questioned, and Rivers, ever the obsessive, listened intently to it all — and lo and behold, the results could often be heard in the following week’s upload of newly revised takes.

Having scores of opinions help shape songs that are seldom above mediocre to begin with is generally a bad idea, and hence, it’s no surprise that Maladroit turned out the way it did. Even the title speaks to the fact that the band was clueless around this time: forum member Lethe suggested it one day, and Rivers immediately adopted it, later remarking that he loved the “evil” sound of the word. One wonders if he knew just how apt of a criticism (and descriptor) that title was: it means “inept.”

“Love Explosion,” to my ears, is the best representative for Maladroit in that it is a shambles within itself. The opening salvo of feedback sounds promising, like the introduction to “Tired of Sex” or another Pinkerton cut, but the verse immediately reins itself into staid pop territory, a la Green. But whereas Green‘s predictability is so polished and tight that it goes down smooth, the production and performance here is a bit sloppier, and the juxtaposition doesn’t really work. The chorus and post-chorus are lazy toss-offs that only mire the track deeper into its own muck. The solo helps a bit, as does the ’96-style slide guitar that comes in and out of the mix at times, but it’s still too much of a jumble to work. The greater Maladroit problem, in a nutshell.

Speaking of the Maladroit sessions, this song underwent pretty extensive revision early in January of 2002. On the first attempt, 1/08, the rhythm guitar was a little more stuttered and danceable; the next day’s take is indistinguishable to my ears, probably a tweaked mix. 1/10 saw the instrumental track that became the bed for the album version, and 1/12 added some minor revisions…But all these public session takes notably contain a glaring lyrical difference. While Maladroit‘s version has typically banal and weak lyrics (except for the interesting, repeated imagery of the line, “They’ve been wanting to kill you in your sleep,” sung in perfect pop melody), the earlier takes feature abhorrent verses about him having met a “little girlie” and being excited to “get off to pleasure each other.” Thank god Rivers had taken up celibacy by the time we next saw him.

Filed in Maladroit | | Comments (48)

Hash Pipe

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Even to the most fervent Weezer diehards, “Hash Pipe” must have come as a big surprise. Hitting airwaves in April of 2001 as the first single from The Green Album, which dropped the following month, it was the first officially released Weezer song in five years — and it was a clear departure. To hear that thick-skulled arena rock riff surging out of the emotional void left by “Butterfly” in 1996 must have been a shock.

The song shot to #2 on the Billboard Modern Rock Chart (back when that still meant anything), and was the first time Weezer found itself building an entirely new fanbase almost from scratch. Teenagers across the country fell in love with “Buddy Holly” back in 1994, and now, seven years later, their little siblings were being introduced to the band in their own way. In retrospect, going with a second self-titled album now actually makes sense. The Green Album was a rebirth, a fresh slate.

Meanwhile, those teenagers who slowdanced to “Say It Ain’t So” and cut their braces to “Why Bother?” had grown up, and many were stunned by Weezer’s change in sound. In a rather personal and candid review for Pitchfork (before they were quite as big as they are today), Spencer Owen wrote:

It was on the radio one day a few weeks ago. I listened to it. I listened to the whole song, from beginning to end. And when it ended, I said no. I said no no no no no. No! Weezer! NO!! Where has Rivers Cuomo gone? What has he done? What has happened to Weezer?! WHERE ARE THE REAL WEEZER?!! My heart was broken. Really. This is going to sound like hyperbole, but I hated music at that moment. For just a moment, I lost faith completely.

While Owen’s reaction was extreme, many had a hard time accepting the new direction, and the great weeding out of Weezer’s original fanbase began (and has continued with every album released since). Folks who had grown up to and weened themselves on Cuomo’s ’90s material had a hard time coping with his apparent “sellout,” and many left; others developed a sort of Stockholm syndrome that keeps them coming back to the band despite a general trend of disappointment; and others still have accepted and embraced Weezer’s work in the new millennium.

While I still think it’s obvious to anyone with good taste that Weezer began with an incredible debut in ’94 and peaked creatively with one of the greatest albums of all time in ’96, I can appreciate certain parts of the later canon for what they are. In truth, “Hash Pipe” is a great song: it is not “Across the Sea” or “Falling For You,” but it makes no attempt to be. It deserves credit for getting what is essentially a heavy metal song (about a transvestite hooker! with falsettos!), however sanitized, on the charts in 2001. It is the only song on Green that actually sounds like “early Beatles meets Helmet,” as guitarist Brian Bell described the album’s rehearsal sessions on Weezer’s official site. I also love the music video, which defines 2001-era Weezer at its most flattering: stylish and hard-rocking, sneering and funny. Guitarist Brian Bell and (new) bassist Mikey Welsh were especially fun to watch at the time, and their kinetic chemistry is well captured here.

Regarding alternate versions, there’s the matter of the radio edit that censors the “hash,” the MTV version which hilariously lists the song title as “Half Pipe” (vocals unaltered, as far as I know – perhaps an idea Cuomo got, or Geffen Records kept, from labelmates Nirvana’s “Waif Me”), and the re-edit of the song that the band made after the fact, which truncates the end of the chorus and shaves about 10 seconds off the song’s runtime. Those ten seconds are important, and their radio playlist-fearing omission is one of the silliest concessions Weezer’s ever made to pop attention spans: it pretty much ruins the song’s momentum.

Oh, and then there are the versions we have of “Hash Pipe” from when it surfaced as a part of the unofficial extension of the “Summer Songs 2000,” which is basically the same, albeit there being some more interesting (and harder) guitar leads on the chorus, a few more engaging drum fills throughout, plus the occasional tweak of the lyric from “kick me” to “kiss me.” For some reason I’ve always been attracted to the “kick me” line (it’s a song about a passive aggressive ego, after all), and prefer how it repeats on the album version.

Filed in A-Sides, Summer Songs 2000, The Grand Playlist, The Green Album | | Comments (69)

Across the Sea

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

In very brief summary, Pinkerton was an album of unmitigated genius that the world simply didn’t want to hear in 1996. It was all at once too personal, ugly and complex for a market that then wanted little more than simple melodies and big arena refrains from their rock songs (all thanks be to the Gallagher brothers). Rivers Cuomo has said that much himself: prior to the release of the album, he thought he had hit upon a new sound that would be a breath of fresh air for audiences still living in the nuclear winter of grunge’s 1994 fallout. But as he later noted on the Rivers Correspondence Board in early 2001, he realized that he had fallen out of step with the times soon after the record’s release. That realization hit him the first time they tried to play “Across the Sea” at a festival.

It’s pretty clear now, though, that “Across the Sea” is one of the very best songs on one of the very best records of the ’90s — quite possibly the finest song Cuomo has ever penned. After an expositional bit of fragile piano and dusty, recorder, an electric guitar chord hits with conviction, leading us into the verse.

At once, the band is in top form, Matt Sharp’s bass rumbling and tumbling like someone dragging himself out of bed, a scrappy but tight beat courtesy Pat Wilson, and Cuomo’s winding vocal melody reciting almost verbatim a piece of fanmail that an 18-year-old girl from Japan sent him in the wake of Tthe Blue Album‘s success, poor grammar intact. As we are soon to find out, this letter resonated with Cuomo as he first read it, probably alone and miserable for his first semester at Harvard, his recently-operated leg in a brace and a cane propped by his dorm room door. Rumors abound that she receives royalties to this day.

The word “epic” was thrown around a lot to hype up this year’s The Red Album, but really, this is about as epic as Weezer gets: a towering chorus, verse vocals filled with ambivalent countermelody, and one of the greatest breakdown-buildup-payoffs in rock history. The very structure of the song seems to reflect Cuomo’s ambivalence: on the chorus he abstains, singing, “I could never touch you / I think it would be wrong”; elsewhere, he fantasizes about everything from the girl’s taste in interior design to the way she masturbates, and briefly considers moving to Japan “just to find the juice” (talk about confessional). Finally, faux-triumphantly, as the song reaches its compositional climax, he returns to the emotional void at the heart of his problems: “How I need a hand in mine to feel.”

It’s a cathartic moment and, interestingly, we, The Listener, find ourselves strangely able to relate. Surely none of us have ever had the experience of being lonely and depressed enough to momentarily consider flying half a world to meet an 18-year-old fan of our rock band, but somehow the emotion of the song communicates itself with such honesty that we can adapt it for our own purposes. That climactic moment, wherein Cuomo accepts the hopelessness of “words and dreams” and promises that can’t possibly be fulfilled, could just as easily be applied to the common pains of any long distance relationship, or an imaginary match we’ve yet to meet. “Why are you so far away from me?” Perhaps, for the listener, the sea is metaphorical; perhaps it isn’t. Perhaps it’s not even a person at all, but simply the waiting for something we don’t want to know will never come.

Perhaps it’s when Cuomo, in a dark moment of clarity in the bridge, takes a moment to psychoanalyze himself and decides to blame all his romantic failings on the way his mother brought him up. But these are little details that don’t really matter: what matters in the end is that somehow, there’s something in this intensely personal, intensely specific song that is so undeniably human, that it can become yours, no matter who you are, if you care to crack its shell. It’s a bit of a struggle, and apparently one few fans of The Blue Album wanted to attempt in 1996, but, like the record it represents, “Across the Sea” is one of the greatest investments an angsty young listener can make — and that is why it has endured.

Funnily, since the ’90s, Rivers has more or less resigned himself to a career of musical mediocrity, pandering to the lowest common denominator, trying to find a song topic as broad and generalized enough as to appeal to the entire world. But it doesn’t matter how many times a man in middle-age attempts to take advantage of well-worn cliches. He can flip the bird to authority (“Troublemaker”), rap the desire for celebrity (“Beverly Hills”) or write as many faceless, formulaic love songs as he wants, but the great irony of Weezer is that they will never again be as relatable as they were on Pinkerton — the most unique, sincere, and individual work of their lives.

Filed in Pinkerton, The Very Best | | Comments (56)

No One Else

Monday, July 14, 2008

With a sudden onslaught of poppy, distorted guitars, a rush of lyrics about love and loneliness, and some truly fantastic falsetto harmonies provided by bassist Matt Sharp, this track embodies all that is great about Blue Album-era Weezer. Rivers Cuomo’s lyric is one of the most cleverly understated of his career, as he pines, “I want a girl who will laugh for no one else / When I’m away she puts her makeup on the shelf / When I’m away, she never leaves the house.” The song sounds triumphant on first listen, but there’s something undeniably sad about the way Sharp’s weeping falsetto accompanies Cuomo’s confident lead, as if the echo of an abused girlfriend. It’s not till long after Cuomo tears into one of his finest solos that the casual listener realizes just how disturbingly misogynistic this little pop tune is.

That facet of the song really came to the fore when the band played a live acoustic version of the song for a radio station on one of the tours following the release of the album. Officially released in 1995 as a b-side to the “Say It Ain’t So” single (and, later, as a track on disc two of the 2004 deluxe edition of Blue), the spare arrangement of acoustic guitars and vocal harmonies brings the song’s eerie subtext to the fore. With only a couple minor fluffs in the performance, the acoustic version is just as essential as the studio version.

Other notable versions of the song include its appearance on November 1992’s “The Real Demo” (made three months after the fan favorite “Kitchen Tape” demo), which shows that the song was pretty much finished long before it was recorded — the performance is identical outside of a bit of added vocal countermelody at the very end of the performance. Also, Cuomo’s Boston-based sideproject Homie played a somewhat countrified version of “No One Else” as something of a crowd pleaser at their few live performances. The one that the fans have, dated 11/4/97, features an added upstroke rhythm guitar, and a delectably southern-fried solo.

Filed in Bonus Tracks, Demos, Live B-Sides, The Blue Album, The Very Best | Tagged , , , | Comments (38)