Weezer’s Lost & Nauseous Escapades

These days, it seems folks either love Weezer or hate them passionately enough to publicly denounce their friends who happen to be fans. Impressions of Hurley will vary widely – because Weezer’s just that kind of polarizing band. There’s an indisputable dance-party energy to their live show that’s positively infectious, but on wax their music becomes far more interpretive and doesn’t always come across as perhaps intended. There’s a formula, a predetermined persona expected upon entry, and Hurley provides an ample dose of it.

But it’s not a return to the mid-nineties self-confessional hearthammers the Weezer soothsayers had told us to expect. Sure, it’s got feel-good jams a’plenty, but does that truly constitute a “return to form?” What Weezer album doesn’t have the kinds of songs that make you want to dance around like a retarded monkey?

For now, we’ll set aside the entirely-plausible conspiracy theories of corporate whoring and smokescreening with the use of Jorge Garcia’s face. Clocking in just under 33 minutes, the next installment from everybody’s favorite gimmick band is definitely more than a ten-track back to school ad.

You’ve heard Memories. It’s inescapable, and succeeds in injecting saccharine nostalgia for that long lost whatever, that long gone special something. But if Seasons In The Sun were a pop-rock jam, it wouldn’t be far off from second track Ruling Me, a tale of falling in love and subsequent subservience to the heart’s new owner. It’s got the kind of chorus to make Weezerphiles sing along with shiteating grins. For casual fans, it’s damn near unlistenable.

“We met in the lunch room / My ocular nerve went pop zoom” is exactly the kind of lyric that the Scott Pilgrim disciples will gush over, and stylistically the band fits in perfectly with the scene. But remember – that movie tanked. It tanked hard.

Join the club of derelicts, procrastinators and proud fuckups on Trainwrecks, a choppy & defiant would-be anthem for every proud loser in Weezland. It’s got universal appeal for a generation of snotty techfiends for whom nothing is cool enough, where you’re hopelessly behind the game if you don’t know the daily memes by 10am and the future just gets in the way of the importance of now. The same people whose first thought after hearing “concept album” is Green Day’s American Idiot.

Unspoken is a gently vocal-led acoustic ditty, adolescent at the onset, but explodes into full a full Rock treatment that belies the gentleness of the onset. Love him or hate him, Rivers Cuomo’s got one hell of a knack for a hook. The chorus,“..and if you take this away from me / I’ll never forgive you, can’t you see / a life will be broken / a hate will be unspoken,” is positively infectious, giving a contextual break to the rough edges of the verse. You can find this jam at collegiate campfires and on YouTube cover-song playlists in a couple weeks. Guaranteed.

Is it unfair to damn an album based on its lyrics? Possibly, but when the instrumentation is so corrosively predictable it’s hard to feel a strong measure of sympathy. Take the absurdity of Where’s My Sex? for example: “Sex-making is a family tradition / Going back to the caveman days, they were walking around in a haze until they figured it out and said ‘Gosh, dang this is great!” An uptempo bridge two and a half minutes in sounds like another song entirely, resulting in a disjointed return to the chorus that results in a “shit, this again?” feeling.

By Run Away I’ve lost hope for the great promise of a kickass Weezer record. Bland and reminiscent of late-seventies ballad-pop, it’s a mid-album saccharine throwaway, a buzzkill to the ears. But Hurley is pulled from the brink by Hang On, which by contrast hits a sweet note, a promise to return for a love left behind. Bittersweet and beautifully earnest, it’s an arena-pleasing anthem, a dead bullseye for the heart-clutching kids who can’t wait to pump their fist in the air and scream along to every “Hang on! Hang on! Hang on!”

Radio will feast upon this song. You’ve been warned.

The sweetness continues on Smart Girls, a catchy, goofy ode to the brainier members of the fairer sex. It turns off & astray on Brave New World, a track saved only by a highly impressive guitar tone that we may have to attribute to guesting former 4 Non Blondes singer Linda Perry. Well, not so much “impressive” as “not predictably Weezer.” Is that what we’re left with? Fawning appreciation for the occasional rogue flavor? Perhaps I’m being cynical.

The narrative has been laid out far in advance it seems, but don’t buy into the hype that Hurley is any revitalization of early-era “greatness” – this album is predictable. It’s exactly the kind of album one would imagine Weezer making in 2010. That doesn’t make it bad – it’s truly not. There’s enough meat for the fans to get off on, to feed the radio beast and add some more spark to the live show. But let’s take a break from pre-emptively praising every new album with prophecies of purity, some old return to form that makes it somehow better than the last time, by default.

On the Weezer beast rolls, and in the end we’ve got one more album to add to the party mix, three more radio hits to distance us further from The Sweater Song. That’s what Weezer’s good for, and they should be appreciated as such.

Thanks to MySpace you can listen to the entire album right now: