Photo: www.hypetrack.com
To those diehard Weezer fans who are frustrated with the direction the band has taken recently: Rivers Cuomo hears you. Or maybe he doesn’t.
Whether consciously or not, a nostalgic Cuomo proclaims in the first song of Weezer’s eighth and newest album “Hurley,” that the “memories make me want to go back there.” The album was released last Tuesday (September 14). While it’s not exactly a return to the glory days of the blue album and “Pinkerton,” the band’s latest effort is at least on the right path, compared to the antics they’ve been pulling the last few years.
During this time, Cuomo and company covered Lady Gaga, jammed with Paramore’s Hayley Williams, penned an atrocious Indian-themed song, and if that’s not bad enough, the quartet even collaborated with Lil’ Wayne on its last studio album (2009’s “Raditude”).
Even before the release of “Hurley,” Weezer enthusiasts must’ve been pleased with the band’s return to its roots. That’s because Weezer left its longtime label Geffen over the summer to join forces with the legendary Indie label Epitaph records, which sparked the careers of The Offspring and Bad Religion.
The aforementioned opening song-and lead single-“Memories” brings back the good ol’ days of great Weezer pop rock. The chorus is very catchy, with a violin-tinged synthesizer riff matching its melody.
The song definitely isn’t short on Cuomo’s typically quirky lyrics, with lines like “Pissing in plastic cups, before we went on stage/ playing hacky sack back when Audioslave was still Rage.”
The album hits a high point with “Unspoken” and “Where’s My Sex?” Both songs would easily have a place on “Pinkerton.” The former begins with a simple acoustic guitar riff, backed by a psychedelic-sounding flute. This combination gives the song an awesome 60’s pop vibe.
Following the bridge, “Unspoken” explodes and releases all this boiling tension via electric guitars. The tension comes from the dark Cuomo’s dark lyrics. For one, he states in the chorus that “if you take this away from me, I’ll never forgive you, can’t you see/ our life will be broken, our hate will be unspoken.”
“Where’s My Sex?” is just a pure musical guilty pleasure. This number features heavy electric guitars, but in a pleasantly poppy style. And Cuomo’s play on words is genius. Throughout the song, he’s clearly describing socks, not sex.
“Mom made my sex, she knitted it with her hands…I can’t go outside without my sex, it’s cold outside and my toes get wet.”
Cuomo collaborated with many decorated songwriters on this album. These include pop star Ryan Adams; Desmond Child, co-writer of Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer”; Linda Perry, writer of Pink’s “Get the Party Started”; and Mac Davis, who published songs for Elvis Presley.
The end result is mediocre songs like “Run Away,” “Time Flies,” and “Trainwrecks.” They’re not bad songs, but given the resumes, you would expect the works to be more impressive. That being said, there really isn’t any one song on “Hurley” that you can single out and say “wow, that’s dreadful.”
You can say that about a handful of songs on the band’s last two albums, “Raditude,” and the red album. And this alone is enough to declare that Weezer is slowly but surely on its way back to the glory days.
And if that’s a stretch, then at the very least they’re back to producing quality pop rock.
