Despite the general opinion that Weezer haven’t released a great album since their early days I still stuck by the band up to their last effort, Make Believe. After traded in their catchy rock riffs for cheesy synthesiser laden ballad’s this release was pretty forgettable & left me wanting more old school Weezer tunes. When I heard the fun upbeat single Pork & Beans (more on that later) from their latest release I was actually pretty excited about the rest of the songs as it sounded like it would be a return to form for the band.
Their 6th studio album starts with the promising Troublemaker. While this tracks full of cringe worth lyrics “Who needs stupid books? They are for petty crooks”, it’s still got enough geeky charm, pop rock hooks and thumping bass to be enjoyable.
The follow up track with a title as ambitious as it sounds is The Greatest man who ever lived (Variations on a shaker hymn). Coming in at just under 6 min this ambitious song covers a lot of bases with heavy metal riffs, bitter sweat melodies, vocal hymns, spoken word segments & some channeling of Queen. Overall this ostentatious mishmash of styles is fairly enjoyable but it’s strange & disjointed nature slightly hold it back from achieving it’s epic intentions. It’s slightly baffling why this experimental song was included as the second track as it’s sits out of place with their follow up & would be better suited as an end piece to the album.
The next song Pork & Beans is best described via it’s lyrics “Everyone likes to dance to a happy song with a catchy chorus and beat so they can sing along”. This upbeat song was apparently written in response to the record label’s request to include more commercially viable ‘hits’ on the album. There’s even a snide reference to this fact with the lines” Timbaland knows the way to reach the top of the charts maybe if I work with him I can perfect the art”.
This one really takes the best parts of their earlier hits like the addictive sing along chorus of Buddy Holly and the crunching guitar hooks of Hash Pipe & puts them into one tightly knit pop rock package. If you haven’t seen the videoclip to Pork & Beans I would highly recommend looking it up as it’s almost as fun as the song itself (try and pick all the cameo’s from cult losers celebrities who scored their 2 min of fame on Youtube).Because of its popularity I can see radio killing this song with overexposure but until then it’s by far my favorite one from the album & should appeal to all old school Weezer fans.
The follow up acoustic track Heart Songs is another poorly placed song with a slow pace & depressing sound that doesn’t go down well after the happiness of the last track. Everyone get dangerous picks up the vibe with its rapping style & rock hooks. Despite a dodgy chorus “everybody get dangerous, boo yah!” & daggy lyrics ” I used to go and tip cows for fun, actually I didn’t do that, ‘Cos I didn’t want the cow to be sad”, this silly song is actually one of the better songs on the album. Dreamin’ goes back to pop basics with bouncing riffs & a carefree sound. However, after 2min the slow pace kicks in and things start to get overly sappy this song slightly overstays it’s welcome at the 5 min mark.
After the previous filler track things unfortunately go downhill for the rest of the album. This is mainly attribute to the fact that the remaining songs (Thought I knew, Cold Dark World, Automatic) see River’s Cuomo swapping singer/writing roles with the other band members for the first time. While Brian Bell (guitarist) & Patrick Wilson (drums) have both formed sidebands in the past, their contribution is still largely underwhelming. While the lyrics & vocals are fairly good these guys still lack the knack of writing a catchy fun song. (maybe it’s because they literally don’t have River’s formula book on how to write a successful pop rock song). Overall these personal songs are all too depressive & monotonous to be of any real interest & stand in stark contrast to the earlier tracks.
The album is then concluded with the incredibly dull and slow The Angel & The One, with a 6 min running time that’s a real struggle to sit through. Unfortunately things aren’t redeemed with the delux version of the album which contains four of the most awful bonus tracks that I’ve heard in a long time. If anything these songs just end up leaving the listener on an even worse note (I’m still confused how a delux version can be worse than the original one).
Final Verdict: While the Red album starts off rather promising the inclusion of too many dreary songs and a confusing track order all get in the way of enjoying what little there is to get from the album. While geeky Weezer fanatics are going to lap this one up, I would still have to rate this as their worst album to date. Unless you enjoy meandering slow songs I would just suggest steering clear of the latter half of the album & just stick to the first six songs.
50 / 100 Pennies
Album Highlights:
Pork & Beans
Troublemaker
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