God damn you half-Italian boys, you do it to me every time. Release a single that elicits a mixture of confusion and wary anticipation, before following up with not so much an album, as a circular cloud of disappointment and missed opportunity.
No, it hasn’t been easy to be a Weezer fan in the 21st Century. Not even having the good grace to release consistently bad records, Rivers Cuomo’s career has followed The DeNiro path: bobbing glimpses of brilliance in an ocean of what-the-fuckery, buoyed by the ongoing credit borne of uniquely brilliant past glories.
The first time we heard ‘The White Album’, delivered to long-suffering Weezer fans on a wave of breathless praise and talk of returns to form, we were (whisper it)…kinda disappointed. That says more about us than it does of the record; to live up to the perceived hype foaming up around the internet last week would have required someone to wipe the last two decades from our memory and then play ‘The Blue Album’ for the ‘first’ time.
So we hit ‘play’ as soon as the wonderful final track, ‘Endless Bummer’, finished. As the album played through again, its melodies revealed themselves to have been fully integrated on first listen. By the third listen, every track was an old friend; every harmony and acoustic guitar flourish exactly where we not only expected, but needed it to be. By fourth listen, lead single and presumed bait-and-switch ‘Thank God For Girls’ emerged as being great, and making perfect sense solely in the context of being the third track on this particular record.
We could break the album down, and pick apart every homage and nudge to the band’s past; producer Jason Sinclair is famously a fan of the band’s early material and as has been noted elsewhere, the production here is not so much a nod to the band’s early material (particularly ‘Pinkerton’) as it is a violent jerking motion carrying the risk of decapitation. Nostalgia? Opener ‘California Kids’ has a chorus which manages to evoke both ‘Say It Ain’t So’ and The Pixies ‘Where Is My Mind’ without ever losing its own character.
But what would be the point? By now, anyone who cares has heard the album and we’re left to finish this love letter to a band we fell in love with in the 90s and whose shit we’ve put up with ever since because there just HAD to be more to come. Weezer are one of the few bands who could release a virtual careers’ worth of albums near-universally-accepted as being sub-par –  sure, the jury may still out be out on ‘Everything Will Be Alright In The End’, but we heard ‘The White Album’ playing in the deliberation chamber so we don’t fancy its chances – without being entirely written off.
If you’re going to return to form, there are fewer finer ways to do so than with an album this perfectly formed. Welcome back, boys.
ROB BARBOUR