The next installment in the Weezer saga has hit the stores (or did so a while ago).  I used to complain about CDs costing about thirty bucks in Switzerland but for this opus I consider that price a real deal.

Weezer have been mainstream now for fourteen years, half of my current lifetime and maybe a third of my personal lifespan. Ha!  This album appears to be at first glance a mid-life crisis work.  The band obviously has no creative direction from their management, only from themselves.  “Themselves”, because the entire band is now largely participating in the songwriting, with a rotating “lead-singer” role and several songs in which the drummer Patrick Wilson plays guitar.

The band-members find themselves keeping their musical and personal boredom at bay with a stick, and with a production budget of one million dollars.  I found myself quite ridiculously claiming to myself that, “this work harks back to the beatles and queen”, with respect to the lushious production. Again, one million dollars. With Cuomo now sporadically yielding the creative reins to his bandmates, his “own” tracks have reached large-scale maturity, as he now can sing much more exact and elastically than in the “blue” and “pinkerton” days. Was that a part of the production?

In Rivers Cuomo’s own songs, “Troublemaker”, “(I am) The Greatest Man who ever lived”, and including the song he wrote though which was sung by bassist Scott Shriner “King”, we hear his own haunting as a geek gone big. That the world doesn’t take him seriously as a ex-metal rock’n'roller is a problem we wish we all had.  Once a geek, forever a geek, haha.

This is a rare occasion when I encourage the purchase of a CD. The booklet’s notes include per track interviews by the band-members of the other band-members explaining aspects of the songs, and even musicial-oriented details are revealed. The forays into southern rap and R&B are not complete flops and invariably lead into the crystalline melodies which we expect from Cuomo and Crew. Maybe, though, the world would take Cuomo’s rock-n-roll credentials more seriously if he didn’t detour into other genres.

Nonetheless, this a hauntingly refreshing listen.   And I’m not a full-fledged weezer acolyte either, the previous album from these guys “Make Believe” is not worth the plastic its printed on.  But the colored albums, “Blue”, “Green”, and this one, “Red”, they really are worth the plastic they’re printed on.

Buy it here, via the clickable pic: