On paper, “California Kids” holds one of the stranger positions in Weezer’s discography. It’s both the opener and weakest song of 2016’s remarkable return to form, The White Album. It’s the one song I’d maybe want to replace, and yet it’s the lynchpin of the album’s central conceit – a beach-combing, day-and-night exploration of present day Los Angeles. In fact, […]
Friday, December 18, 2015
Even Green‘s most personal song – written about the same flame who inspired other top-shelf songs of the era, “O Girl” and “Do You Wanna Get High?” – is a product of the album’s commercial calculus and strophic simplicity. In discussing the penultimate song on the record, “Glorious Day,” I praised this formulaic monomania for the trance-like state it […]
Saturday, December 12, 2015
Last time, with “Photograph,” I mentioned the hypnotic properties of The Green Album formula. I’ve been floating in that ooze a lot lately. Living in a busybody city like Seoul, I sometimes want to disengage from my aural environment, be it the talkshow drone of cab radio or the auditory hell of your average ramen bar. Green is the perfect fix: even […]
Saturday, December 5, 2015
Following the failure of Pinkerton, Rivers Cuomo spent half a decade smothering one of the brightest pop songwriting muses of our time. After some early indicators, the first real product of this process was 2001’s Green Album, a 28-minute-thin slice of early Beatles songcraft sieved through the compression filter of safe, formulaic late ’90s radio rock. “Photograph” is the […]
“Cue the feedback?” “Cue the feedback.” So goes the dialogue that begins “Do You Wanna Get High?” It’s a detail that’s so far eluded discussions of Weezer’s latest single, but it might be the entire point. The cliched squall of amplifier feedback that follows this studio banter serves as a familiar preface for what is by far the […]
Monday, December 20, 2010
For my money, “Buttefly” might very well be the best thing Rivers Cuomo’s ever done. I usually vacillate between this one and “Only in Dreams” as Weezer’s definitive moment (and sometimes the defiantly great Red era outtake “Pig,” even), and at 8 minutes, “Dreams” has a bit of an inherent advantage — it is conspicuously […]
Tonight, on Teenage Victory Songs, we will be going over some of the reasons why “Blowin’ My Stack” is a modern Weezer classic. You are invited to download it and listen first, or read along as you go. 1. Starting a song about blowing out your amp with a riff played through…well, a blown-out amp. […]
Friday, September 3, 2010
Seeing how I did the knee-jerk reaction thing for one of Hurley’s lesser tracks (the unfortunate first single/opener, “Memories”), I thought I’d do something similar for one of the new album’s best. (Two relevant parentheticals, first: though I still deem it a negligible tune, “Memories” does fare a bit better in the context of the […]
The way back has never been the way forward, for you or for me or for all the good folks we know in Weezer. Like people (they’re made of ’em, after all), bands need to grow, develop, evolve — and in Weezer’s case, you can hear the sweet sound of progress in tunes like “Run […]
On March 24, 2002, Rivers Cuomo issued a “Fair Warning” to his fans on a certain Weezer message board, the contents of which simply read: “rock/rap.” It was a threat, and in the midst of 2002 it was one that resonated deeply — at the time the combination meant Rage Against the Machine at best, […]