Music for Hypocrites 01.25.07: =w=
Posted by Matt Stone on 01.25.2007
Music for Hypocrites returns! Wait, was it gone? Well anyways, this week we put Weezer under the microscope. Read on, reading person!
Being the only IT person in a company that sells IT is unfortunate. My apologizes for the one person on the planet that may have missed my column last week, as my paying gig came before my 20 non-paying gigs and put a stop to them temporarily. On with the show…
NEWS
My dog goes utterly insane if you sing that "Taco Flavored Kisses" song from South Park. It's news to me, anyways.
PLUGS
I want to plug a friend of mine for being a good musician and putting his abilities to sit in a basement or rec room and play guitar all day to good use. He recently had a kid and realizing that all kid's music is lame, made his own. I give you Rockosaurus Rex, the first metal kid's cd ever: http://www.rockosaurusrex.com. My nephew has it, why doesn't yours?
WEEZER, WE HARDLY KNEW YE
Oh 1994, you year of awesome, you. I had my first crap job, which just happened to be at a music store and received all the goodies that came with it. One of those goodies was Weezer's Blue Album.
Man, talk about the right place at the right time. That disc just resonated with me as well as many of my friends. Weezer managed to take the quiet/loud dynamic that was all the rage with grunge and alt rock bands during that time yet turn it into dorky pop songs, and I ate it up. They would soon become my favorite band in the whole world.
13 years, one long pause and 4 albums later they've slowed to a stop. Once being one of their biggest fans, I now can say they bug the crap out of me.
It all started the day I heard that Rick Rubin was going to produce a Weezer record. That seemed like the black plague to me. To be honest, I haven't even been able to listen through the entire Make Believe disc without getting irritated. It's boring, mindless and hasn't one shred of emotion to be found anywhere. In the interest of column-izing my aggressions, I've spent the last two weeks going through nothing but Weezer discs and the various demo mp3s and b-sides I've collected over the years and will vent about it thusly.
To this day, the Blue Album still stands out as a solid disc to me (even better since the recent remastering). Produced by Ric Ocasek, it has a great Spector-ish "wall of sound" with the guitars that just wash over everything. The lead off track, "My Name is Jonas" is a great intro that explains right away what this band is about. There's the loud/quiet dynamic, the decent melody and harmonies, the goofiness yet behind it a sadness…"My Name is Jonas" really sets the tone for better things to come.
Oh, they do come. Forgive "Buddy Holly" being so overplayed and on every Windows 95 machine and MTV. "Undone" was an excellent single and opened my eyes to the video tomfoolery that is Spike Jonze. Then we have "Say It Ain't So", a songs which just OWNS me. Regardless of how I feel about this band now, that song will always remain within my top 3 favorite songs of all time. Every summer I still find a couple of days where it just gets spun continuously while I sit on a porch and drink.
After the Blue Album, Weezer took their sweet and precious time getting a follow up completed. They eventually dumped the nut-filled turd that was Pinkerton on the world and it was rightfully panned. Ok, so I bought it. I listened for months. Yet despite Rolling Stone retroactively re-scoring their review on this disc and despite the lashing I could receive from any diehard Weezer fans out there, this disc just isn't good. It resonated with me ten years ago, but it hasn't aged well over time, sounding more like a guy writing a bunch of crap because he had a bad breakup instead of a pop/rock band trying to write a solid follow up. Tracks like "El Scorcho" and "The Good Life" are decent enough, but the production makes you suffer through listening to them. I pray the supposed real plan didn't unfold, as according to Wikipedia and supposedly River Cuomo's blog, this disc was supposed to be a concept album called Songs From The Black Hole. Sorry, dork-rock concept albums shouldn't exist.
So, we get to the failure that is Pinkerton, and Weezer world goes silent. Rivers goes back to Harvard, becomes a hermit and so forth. Matt Sharp goes on to work full-time with his band The Rentals, which peters out eventually (under their recent return). Pat Wilson had the Special Goodness going and Brian Bell was working on The Space Twins. Yet nothing coming from Rivers' until people start reporting about him getting on stage in local clubs with Juliana Hatfield's backing band and playing some new tunes. Shortly thereafter, the new tunes were squashed and the band hooked back up, this time with Mikey Welsh on bass. They started work on the Green Album.
The Green Album is hands down my favorite disc. It was just…so…easy! Simple song construction! Solos mimicking the lead vocals! There was nothing to this, just good melody, a few good chords and put it to tape. It was lame, but it worked, and to be honest, I totally stole the idea and latched on to it. I had been recently unemployed, living at my parents house and my dad has a recording studio, so when I wasn't drunk or mowing the lawn I was in the studio. Creating a song where you only need two parts to repeat and a solo that echoes the first part makes for some incredibly quick and easy songwriting. I had an album done and ready before I even had a band again. Enough about me. Weezer was back and somehow managed to latch on to a new generation of fans, although a bunch of fans that were enamored with a song called "Hash Pipe" and sumo wrestlers.
About now is where the band turned south for me, with their fourth release: Maladroit.
It was a known fact that the band likes their Kiss, Van Halen and Nirvana. In random interviews, Rivers would talk about having metal licks but not being able to use them. So, we have Maladroit, which bring some actual guitar soloing back in the band, on top of a harder feel. It was good, but it sounded too much like the band had to up the ante to stay afloat with nu-metal bands out there, which is never something anyone should do. The overall disc for me sounded disjointed. Every song on this disc is missing just one or two things to make them great, which strikes me as odd since they took so long releasing it and even asked for fan criticism when putting it together. Then again, I'd figure the majority of fan criticism is "HAY RIVARS AWEOSME!" so we'll just leave it at that.
By this point, it seemed like they were slowing down a bit, but they were still settling like hotcakes, so why not hook up with Rick Rubin and make the next album? First step, throw out a bunch of songs and get to work with Rubin, because he's great, right? Blech. I mean, I'll give him some credit, Tom Petty's Wildflowers was a good disc, and he recorded Danzig so he's not all that bad, but the later years with the whole "Ok Mr. Cash, let's make some records, but let's keep it real scaled down and don't forget we need some contemporary covers for the kids!" scheme that carried on longer than Johnny Cash annoyed the hell out of me.
Rubin and the gang worked an released Make Believe, a collection of songs I never wanted to hear produced by a man I didn't like. The band sounds tired, unenthused and uncaring all over this disc. For a band whose front man wore his heart on his sleeve for so many years, to hear this disc deflated me. After this, I just gave up on them. They did to. The band is, well, maybe officially broken up, but no good would ever come of them getting back together in my opinion. If I remember correctly, Make Believe made more money than any other disc of theirs, so naturally they'd go the Chili Pepper route and retread with Rubin to make three more discs of crap I don't want to hear. Rivers is off meditating and it looks like the rest of the band has disappeared into other projects. Hopefully one of them will release something worthy of championing its cause.
