Weezer -- Classic or Dud?

why are they doing a white album? will it include their revolution 9?

Brilliant band. Each record post-Make Believe has had at least a couple great songs on it. i.e. "(If You're Wondering If I Want You To) I Want You To" from Raditude. Red Album was remarkably consistent.

I disagree, but I thought their last one had 2 or 3 that were a lot less embarrassing than usual.

i feel like sliting their throats.

idk, their commercial appeal looks pretty dinged to me, even with consistent top 5 debuts. Every album for the past decade has sold worse than the one before it, beyond what you'd expect even if you take into account the impact of unauthorized downloads and streaming.

― intheblanks, Friday, January 15, 2016 2:25 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

also "Thank God For Girls" (which i thought was one of their better recent singles!) didn't even make the top 10 of the Alternative chart, which is usually incredibly easy for a lead single from a big '90s band.

Shakey OTM ITT.

I'm usually fine with dismissing artists' personal failings if the work is good enough, but a) Weezer's work isn't good enough and b) Rivers is totally loathsome

http://www.weezerpedia.com/wiki/index.php?title=Interview_between_Rivers_Cuomo_and_Joe_Matt

"There was this one time in Japan that was really emotional for me because this is when I was first starting to figure all this stuff out about being really aggressive. I'd been in Japan for a week and every night there were ten or fifteen girls in my room and nothing happened because I wasn't confident enough to say "Let's have sex or get out of the room." So finally, at the end of my stay there I said, "Whoever wants to stay in the room has to take their clothes off and get on the bed."and most of them left but four of them stayed. It was a very difficult step for me to take but I hadto take it. It was the truth about what I wanted."

jfc

http://x3.cdn03.imgwykop.pl/c3201142/comment_D1LivSBBuOJQXH4RQHpo9HxhEAv8bLeP.gif

L.A. Girlz
https://itunes.apple.com/us/post/idsa.6c0f9054-d599-11e5-85c4-7ebee77c13cd

it's also good!

plus it references jabberwocky for some reason!

it's great

video perhaps not so much
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiPsG7Yjrvk

this song is not too bad

"California Kids" is pretty good!

New album is rather fantastic, bit like the previous one rly

great record

like such a solid power pop record, but also their first album in forever where all of the songs feel connected to each other?

"summer elaine and drunk dori" is like a major key "lithium" rip

^ damn totally otm

yeah this record rules

old weezer is so much better than middle period weezer

loving 'Jacked Up' atm

i like that they call it the white album. these guys still have a sense of humour. i have a question. did they ever get rich with their music? after the first album (so great) they did not release one album i ever wanted to listen to. but this one at least starts quite promisingly.

quick search turned up:

$30 Million
Rivers Cuomo of Weezer — Net worth: $30 Million.Oct 19, 2015

but i have no idea how accurate that is.

they've done well. their first record went triple platinum, pinkerton went platinum, green probably did too. seems like they're always on tour, and they frequently headline small/mid-size rock festivals in the U.S. and Europe. they're, uh, big in japan. i worked at the Baltimore Virgin Festival in 2009, co-headlined by blink-182 and Weezer. they were good. "(If You're Wondering If I Want You To) I Want You To" is a great song. Love the title, too.

i don't like making new threads anymore but if anyone wants to post a "Weezer 2004-present POX" list, i'd be curious to see what kind of stuff gets chosen.

this is surprisingly good, definitely their third best. the last one was decent relative to the garbage they'd been making for ages but this is much tighter and more consistent, and with higher highs too. it's sort of a weird amalgamation of different styles they've done in the past but that works better than i'd have thought.

Wow, so strange to read so many consecutively positive posts on ILM, about new Weezer

Pitchfork naturally damned it with the faintest of praise, but their new music is never going to get a genuinely good review from them ever again

i will have to give this a shot. i heard the singles and was not too impressed, they sounded like same old crummy nu Weezer

the run from "summer elaine and drunk dori" to "jacked up" is my favorite set of weezer songs in forever

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GotFSkL2PXo

this song is just the best

jacked up's chorus is insanely good. it's the wildcard song a la 'Freak Me Out', except done properly

I enjoyed this all the way through, 'easily 3rd best' otm

I like this album.

the run from "summer elaine and drunk dori" to "jacked up" is my favorite set of weezer songs in forever

This is totally the peak of the album for me as well. I never thought I could love a song called something like 'L.A. Girlz'...

I appreciated the last album too, but this is altogether more sure of itself. Plus some of the lyrics are even more amazingly weird than usual.

The last album seemed like such a desperate attempt to recapture the Blue Album especially the guitar solos, but I certainly didn't hate them for trying. The white album feels really relaxed and for once not chasing any particular trend. I hope they get a hit out of it.

Lastly Rivers claims he has a black album all ready to go, but with Rivers its hard to say if he's even telling the truth or just trying to have fun with the press.

This was part of a special album package earlier this year

Take a Greyhound to the Galapagos with Rivers where you’ll stay only for a limited time. Once you get to the islands, you’ll go bird watching to try and find the elusive White-cheeked pintail

My only problem with EWBAITE, other than Back To The Shack being terrible, is that the solos are a bit too widdly in the Maladroit tradition rather than the spikiness of 90s Weezer. Well, I suppose all the "guitars are dead!" shite at the very beginning it pretty cringe. Great album otherwise though. I hope that not every album they do will be a "return to form" from now on

Best since Green at least, maybe Pinkerton. Ewbaite was terrible.

spent a lot of time with ewbaite earlier this year and it is super not terrible

It's garbage. A few decent songs (AGN, British, the Happy Meal one – Lonely Girl is alright for the Green outtake that it is), but arguably their worst ever (Back to the Shack may not quite invent a new way to suck, but it's one of a very rare breed), and many more that had one or two good ideas but come out so confused and embarrassing (Foolish, Da Vinci, jesus christ Anonymous). Many of the best riffs are jacked, some from very unfortunate places (vocal melody of Father's verse = Feel Good Inc, Anonymous is basically the theme from The Office). The fidelity is awful too, they ran out of money for the project before even the production was finished, which is why some of the premixes they shared sound better than the album itself.

Even if it were good, the whole thing is tainted by the fact that in order to make his "return to form" Rivers relied on hundreds of hours of focus group sessions conducted with die-hard Weezer fans (ten-point scales, bubble choices, "How do these songs compare to how you would rate the first two albums," the works) over a period of at least 4 years, without even consulting his band. It sure sounds it.

i was at one of those! I just remember it being 10 point scales and notes

"da vinci" is great, i get the hate but rivers' lyrics have always been embarrassing

or tbh I don't get the hate because rivers' lyrics have always been embarrassing

also love "eulogy for a rock band" and "cleopatra"

Yeah, they changed the system a bunch. Sometimes it was just Karl and a tape-recorder in a hotel room, one-on-one (creepy much?).

The lyrics are pretty dumb, sure (I love the chorus', except if by Rosetta Stone he means the software, which of course he does). I'm mostly put off by the Foster the People verses. There's nothing wrong with them in concept, they just sound so limp and hollow. The embarrassment factor in Rivers' lyrics up through Maladroit and after has a totally different valence though, with "No One Else" and Pinkerton he's trying to sound ugly and regressive, and doing it with artistry. Compare that to him channeling a similar voice on a Make Believe outtake like "Outta Here" and it sounds totally clueless. Plus yeah, once you get to Red, you've got the additional stench of product placement everywhere (or a "man, I hope he got paid for that" feel, at least).

"Eulogy" is decent in a vacuum but sounds too much like that one Killers song, and one or two more from that era. Also ties into the whole "rock is dead, guitars are dead, but we're gonna rock out like '94 with the guitar strap the fans love (and focus groups, and a song doctor from Dr. Luke's clinic...shhhhh)" self-reflexivity that I found noxious. "Cleopatra" is another one that had potential, but given that the record reuses so much material from Rivers' archive I almost wonder if the nu metal post-chorus comes from the shelved Fred Durst collab.

With White, I feel none of these issues. And I think these are easily his best lyrics since Pinkerton, in some ways even better just on the page (at least in places – still needs time for me). You could still parse '00s Weezer tendencies in moments of EWBAITE, and they just weren't integrated at all, but here I think they fit into the fabric of the record real well and are some of the brightest spots on it (TGFG, "Jacked Up"). My main issue is the self-plagiarism ("Only In Dreams" has no business being in KOTW's bridge, "LA Girlz" sounds a little much like "Susanne" and "Miss Sweeney" at least pulled it off in a completely different way, the "Pink Triangle" ordeal with the DYWGH solo, and many more), and rated against Green I feel like, well, at least he wrote Green on his own...but those are pretty minor gripes and barely impinge on my top-to-bottom enjoyment of this album. Nice to be able to say that for the first time in my ~14 years of being a fan.

For the record, Red is a giant mess, but if you resequenced the record strictly using outtakes that they actually had finished and mixed at the time, you could come out the other side with something even better than White...That's consensus in a lot of Weezer discussions, though not sure if the opinion's come up here before.

I definitely agree re: the idea of a resequenced red being potentially one of the best weezer records. those b-sides are all great

anyway i was substituting for a friend at one of those focus groups, and had very little investment in a new weezer record being good. the first song they played was "i've had it up to here" and i lost my mind. i think all the songs i rated highly made the record, except for a truly offensive one I gave a 7 or 8 too bc I thought I would make people so mad

I remember nothing about it of course, other than it was definitely not "back to the shack"