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 […]
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 […]
I’ve already spent some time explaining why the Red Album b-sides were such a letdown, so I won’t belabor the point here. But it suffices to say that with “Love My Way,” once again some very incomplete fraction of the band covered a good song poorly — in this case, drummer Pat Wilson does a […]
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Looking at the original lyric sheet for the pre-Blue Album song “Paperface” is a pretty rare (and funny) treat. There is an aborted attempt at a verse that begins, “I played the game / I was all right / For a while / I didn’t fight,” which Rivers Cuomo scribbled over with an emphatic “CRAP” (made […]
After 21 northeastern winters in a row, I’ve grown pretty damn sick of the season. The cold always seems to pierce through my woolen layers and straight to the bone; the already sickly social scene at my college seems to fall headlong into a frost-bitten coma; and if there’s any magic to be found in […]
Without question, “Oh Lisa” is the worst product of the Green Album era. As one of two tracks on the flipside to the “Island In The Sun” single (paired with the relatively benign “Always”), it is in some ways difficult to distinguish from its many contemporaries — the opening lyrical couplet is a rehash of […]
“Undone — The Sweater Song” was the first Weezer song to capture the imagination of the alt-rock nation (and in 1994, it really did have enough of a set perimeter and population to be called a “nation”), but “Buddy Holly” was the first to make the band pop superstars. And though the infallible melody and […]
“Slob” has had a pretty interesting life, for a Weezer song. The tune was debuted during the Summer Songs 2000 tour, which found it sticking out in the memory of fans as a rare slab of raw emotion in a batch of Rivers Cuomo’s least personal songs to date. Truth be told, the semi-officially released […]