Salient

Album Review: Weezer - The Red Album

By Chris Gilbert | 28 Jul, 2008

As they’ve swung from album to album Weezer have managed to evoke an entire repertoire of despairing knee-jerk reactions from their fans. From ‘this isn’t like their last album’ to ‘what the fuck were they thinking!?’ to ‘who are these yokels and how can I get them to stop aurally molesting me?’ On their third self-titled Red album they’ve finally landed on the heartbreaking ‘I just don’t know anymore’. Weezer have at last gone full circle and made music that is not much a shadow of their former awesomeness as more of a suicide note.

The album is a case of an old dog refusing to learn new tricks: lo-fi quality songs produced by a high profile band on a high-fidelity record. This approach was never going to work, and it doesn’t. The sound is too polished to be appealing. Weezer’s dirty guitar riffs that were once raw and captivating have been so heavily doused in varnish that on first listen they slipped right off me.

Tracks Troublemaker and Pork and Beans display that if anything Weezer’s music has actually diminished in maturity. They no longer have the credibility to get away with childish lyrics, unattractive rhythms, and a cute demeanour. It’s stupid, and it would help Weezer a great deal if they decided to just grow the fuck up and move on.

The slow soulful Heart Songs is as close as the album comes to producing four minutes of honest music. While seeming sincere, the soppy lyrics that reflect back to Weezer’s glory days of the early ‘90’s have little more effect than to present a pathetic apology for the rest of the album.

So this is not an album oozing with originality. This is an album of Weezer trying to be influenced by their own sound, and inevitably failing. It is an album of Weezer becoming a bad Weezer cover band.

However I’m willing to forgive all of this if only because the last track is the best cover of The Band’s The Weight I have ever fucking heard; the nerve of these guys to annoy the shit out of me for ten tracks only to give me the puppy eyes! Daw, Weezer your album might be intolerable and on the intellectual level of a commerce student, but you’re alright. Actually, I kind of feel like listening to it again.